Intrafiction

Intrafiction is a narrative mode in which a text foregrounds or incorporates another text that exists within the fictional world. In intrafiction, characters may encounter or read a manuscript, diary, letters, a newspaper, or a book that is presented as an artifact of the story’s universe. The technique is a form of metafiction that concentrates on texts internal to the fiction rather than on the act of writing itself or on the reader’s engagement with the outside author.

Common forms include embedded narratives (a story told inside the main tale), books within the book, or diegetic documents that the characters refer to or publish in-universe. Intrafiction often uses diegetic realism—complete with imagined publication details, bibliographic cues, or editorial apparatus—to create a sense that the world has its own literary economy. The effect can be polyphonic, rendering multiple perspectives, and can invite critical reading of how meaning is generated and circulated inside the fiction.

Notable examples discussed in criticism include Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, both of which deploy in-world texts and layered narratives. Intrafiction is closely related to metafiction and intertextuality, yet it specifically foregrounds the within-world textual artifacts as central modes of storytelling and world-building rather than discrete commentary on fiction as a whole.