metanarrativen.
/ˈmɛtəˌnarətɪv/, U.S. /ˈˌmɛdəˈˌnɛrədɪv/ Any narrative which is concerned with the idea of storytelling, spec. one which alludes to other narratives, or refers to itself and to its own artifice. Also: a piece of narrative, esp. a classic text or other archetypal story, which provides a schematic world view upon which an individual's experiences and perceptions may be ordered.
ΚΠ
1976 K. W. Hope Film & Meta-narrative in Diss. Abstr. Internat. 36 4814/1 Film is..a particularly rich narrative medium, so meta-narrative, this tendency to express an awareness of the storytelling in the story, is likely to be frequent.
1982 G. Prince Narratology iv. 121 The most evident metanarrative signs..are probably those which comment on linguistic code units.
1988 L. Hutcheon Canad. Postmodern i. 15 Jean-François Lyotard has defined the ‘postmodern condition’ as one characterized by a distrust of ‘meta-’ or ‘master’ narratives, that is, of the received wisdom or the grand narrative systems that once made sense of things for us.
1991 E. J. Smyth Postmodernism & Contemp. Fiction iii. 73 It has been central to the nouveau roman's poetics to establish a literary-historical metanarrative as a legitimizing strategy.
1996 Éire—Ireland Spring 10 The metanarratives of folklore recognize that the transaction between teller and audience depends on listeners' willingness to suspend disbelief if offered a good enough story.
1996 Church Times 17 May 15/2 The metanarratives that people use to make sense of the world (i.e. Christianity and Communism)..are all dismissed as being part of a defunct modernism.
This is a new entry (OED Third Edition, December 2001; most recently modified version published online March 2022).
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n.1976