Historiographic metafiction is a term coined by Canadian literary theorist Linda Hutcheon in the late 1980s.
According to Hutcheon's "A Poetics of Postmodernism", works of historiographic metafiction are "those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages".
[5] Works often described as examples of historiographic metafiction include: Doctor Copernicus by John Banville (1976), The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles (1969), Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow (1975), Legs by William Kennedy (1975), Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (1979), Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981), The Great Indian Novel by Shashi Tharoor (1989), Possession by A. S. Byatt (1990), The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (1992), The Master of Petersburg by J. M. Coetzee (1994), and Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon (1997).
By seeking to represent both actual historical events from World War II while, at the same time, problematizing the very notion of doing exactly that, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) features a metafictional, "Janus-headed" perspective.
[6] Literary scholar Bran Nicol argues that Vonnegut's novel features "a more directly political edge to metafiction" compared to the writings of Robert Coover, John Barth, and Vladimir Nabokov.