English

Adjective

self-referential ‎(comparative more self-referential, superlative most self-referential)

1. That or who refers to itself or oneself; used as a stylistic device when done in literary works.
   • 1991, Edmund J. Smyth, Postmodernism and contemporary fiction, B T Batsford Ltd

     Many women authors extend the sort of metafictional self-scrutiny which The Golden Notebook so extensively sustains: Eva Figes's novels, for example, often raise self-referential questioning of their own representational validity and Muriel Spark teases several of her heroines with unsettling awareness of the process of their own creation.

Translations

Related terms

• self-reference

Hyponyms

• autological
• meta (informal)