Word.ws English Dictionary

surfiction

surfiction noun: a style of fiction that rejects realism and advertises its own fictional status, similar to metafiction, postmodernism or fabulation.

Noun

surfiction (uncountable)

  1. A style of fiction that rejects realism and advertises its own fictional status, similar to metafiction, postmodernism or fabulation.
    • ...it was of a piece with a broader postwar codification and intensification of modernist reflexivity in the form of what came to be called "surfiction" or, more durably, "metafiction."2009, Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, Harvard University Press, page 9

Origin of surfiction

Coined by Raymond Federman in his 1973 manifesto "Surfiction—A Position".

Questions about surfiction

What does surfiction mean?
Surfiction means a style of fiction that rejects realism and advertises its own fictional status, similar to metafiction, postmodernism or fabulation.
What part of speech is surfiction?
Surfiction is a noun.

Words near surfiction in the dictionary

  1. surffishes
  2. surfgrass
  3. surfgrasses
  4. surficial
  5. surficially
  6. surfiction
  7. surfie
  8. surfier
  9. surfies
  10. surfiest
  11. surfing

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: surfiction (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “surfiction.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/surfiction. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.