Self-referential

Origin

- + referential

Full definition of self-referential

Adjective

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 LtdMany 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 terms

• self-reference

Hyponyms

• autological