Self-referential

Quick meaning: Self-referential is an adjective meaning That refers to itself or oneself.

Meaning

That refers to itself or oneself.

More Meanings

1. (specifically) In a literary work: referring to the author or the author's other works.

Example Sentences

What makes Scream so effective, and so timeless, is that it’s both a winking and self-referential breakdown of the tropes of the horror genre and a nearly flawless embodiment of the same.

It [Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy] also has a design strictly self-referential. The author feigns, that the beatified spirit of his mistress has obtained leave to warn and purify his soul by shewing him the state of things in the next world.

That is a very pleasant line, the one that we have italicized; […] Why did he [Ben Jonson] not write more such? He might answer that he did, and that his poetry was full of enjoyment. But it is not; at least not in the entirely happy, familiar, unmisgiving, self-referential, and yet not self-loving sense that we speak of.

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.

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include self-describing, selfsome, selflike, selfly, ouroboric, autocentric.

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