She also edited influential texts on post-modernity, chief among them being A Postmodern Reader (SUNY, 1993), co-edited with Joseph P. Natoli.
"Through a double process of installing and ironizing, parody signals how present representations come from past ones and what ideological consequences derive from both continuity and difference" (Politics, 93).
Hutcheon coined the term historiographic metafiction to describe those literary texts that assert an interpretation of the past but are also intensely self-reflexive (i.e. critical of their own version of the truth as being partial, biased, incomplete, etc.)
Hutcheon argues irony is a "...semantically complex process of relating, differentiating, and combining said and unsaid meanings - and doing so with an evaluative edge" that is enabled by membership in what she describes as "discursive communities".
[1] She argues that Canadians lack of a clear nationalist metanarrative and international influences such as history as a British colony, proximity to the United States of America, and immigration, are disposed to seeing their identities as ironic – caught up in multiple discursive communities.