This book provides a new understanding of fictocriticism—a genre stemming from metafiction, écriture feminine, and postmodernism—via original creative and experimental writing devoted to the issue of the contemporary self, offering a reinvigoration of fictocriticism as a writing strategy.

Cholewa explores questions surrounding what fictocriticism is and what it can do, and the essential paradox between theories surrounding fictocriticism suggesting how ‘freeform’ it is, yet how non-freeform and chameleonic it still seems to be due to its lack of theoretical ‘rules’. Evaluating fictocriticism as both an art form and as a vehicle for higher theory and criticism, he offers and proposes further academic attention across a plethora of sociocultural, artistic, scientific, educational, political, and historical fields.

Propelled by the work(s) of Roland Barthes, the ‘godfather of fictocriticism’, the ultimate goal of this research and text is to provide new and expanded reading tools that both explain the subjectivity and context of fictocritical writings and simultaneously innovate on the form.