Writing the Reader: The Literary Child in and Beyond the Book

While children's metafiction shares some of the preoccupations identified by theorists of adult metafiction, it also reveals a specific set of authorial assumptions about child-adult as well as child-book relationships. This article examines that subset of metafiction sometimes termed "intrusion fantasies," namely fantasies containing characters who engage with others designated within the text as "fictional." In their exploration of reader-text interaction as the warp and woof of the marvelous, authors such as Geraldine McCaughrean, James Reeves, Chris Van Allsburg, David Wiesner, Cornelia Funke, and others contemplate the psychology of reading while simultaneously functioning to define what reading should be.