Seyed-Javad Habibi - Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Khouzestan, ACECR, I.R.Iran
Sara Soleimani-Karbalaei - Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Khouzestan, ACECR, I.R.Iran.

Delving into the narration of Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth (۲۰۱۲), this enquiry unravels the threads of conventional realistic narrative and avant-garde postmodernist one in the tapestry of the novel, arguing that through the miscibility of these two heterogeneous modes of narration McEwan constructs a narrative meta-design that innovatively adds an enigmatic dimension to the spy novel genre. In his dual narrative that depends on verisimilitude as well as self-conscious reflexivity, he once again, a decade after his Atonement (۲۰۰۲), demonstrates his literary taste for bridging the "past" and "present." Marinating his narrative in Cold War events, and adding a dash of what Linda Hutcheon calls "historiographic metafiction," he makes a postmodern signature dish that sustains its paradoxical hybridity: a representational self-reflexivity or an anti-representational reflexivity. Aligned with Monica Cojocaru's detection of a "metafictional twist" in the novel as a part of her comparative investigation, this study discusses that Sweet Tooth's dual narrative makes it eligible to wear the postmodern badge.

Metafiction, Metanarrative, self-representation, Hybrid Postmodernism, Anti-representation, Self-conscious Narration