Metabibliographic Fiction: Metafiction After the Death of the Book in Steven Hall’s Maxwell’s Demon and Nicola Barker’s I Am Sovereign

This essay examines the combination of an aesthetic interest in the book with metafiction’s self-reflexive literary strategies in two recent British fictions, Steven Hall’s Maxwell’s Demon (2021) and Nicola Barker’s I Am Sovereign (2019). Both fictions, I argue, engage in what I describe as “metabibliographic fiction.” Metabibliographic fictions are fictions that explore the intellectual, narrative, and aesthetic dimensions of metafiction, but do so in ways that incorporate forms of self-reference into their linguistic and graphic structures that engage with the book as a media device. Situating this work within the context of what N. Katherine Hayles terms “postprint,” the essay places metabibliographic fiction at the critical intersection of textual materialism, studies of bookishness, and taxonomies of aesthetic self-consciousness. It then analyzes metafictional and metabibliographic devices in Maxwell’s Demon and I Am Sovereign in order to open theories of the contemporary book to metafiction’s narrative and intellectual legacies.