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In ‘Twelfth Night,’ by William Shakespeare Malvolio exclaims  that “nothing can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes,” a line that Robbie, Cecelia's lover. also says. This draws the texts together and also highlights the tragedy that Briony will eventually come between the love of Robbie and Cecilia.

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In ‘The Trials of Arabella,” written by Briony, the play ends when the protagonist announces: “Here’s the beginning of our love at the end of our travail.”  Similarly, Briony ends her novel in a fictional ‘happily ever after’ to satisfy her readers, and to show them how tragic Cecilia and Robbie’s love is; so tragic that it can only exist in a fiction novel written by Briony.

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In the epilogue we come to know that Briony never saw Robbie or Cecilia in 1940 and if you read the novel a second time you will notice subtle mentions of this fact in Part Three where she feels "the distance between her and another self". One version of her returning to the hospital, the other version walking on to visit her sister. This metafictional strategy used by McEwan shows the possibility of Briony making up for her crime to the readers. But in the epilogue, we realise that “a cowardly Briony limped back to the hospital, unable to confront her recently bereaved sister” (371), Briony’s atonement is entirely fictional.

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This epilogue at the end of the novel, reveals interesting things about it, and therefor turns the novel into a metafiction.
The fact that Briony makes changes to her manuscript attempting to atone her crime is evident that the novel is a metafiction. McEwan also draws attention to the numerous times Briony rewrote her novella, Two Figures by a Fountain, in attempt to atone for the crime

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The writer of Atonement focusses on the issues of storytelling; writing, imagination and the nature of the truth. In the novel, imagination plays an important role because it helps the development of the story. The protagonist, a 13 year old Briony represents imagination in the novel. Briony's imagination and passion for writing caused her to think of Cecilia and Robbie as characters in a play, rather than real life people, which lead to her being blind to the truth. She misinterpreted the scene at the fountain as blackmail, rather than a mere accident.

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The most obvious definition of metafiction is 'a novel about a novelist writing a novel'.
Atonement by Ian McEwan, is a novel about a novelist, Briony, who writes a novel, which is called Atonement.

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Hyperreality is the inability to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality.
Hyperreality occurs in the novel when Briony deliberately replaces the truth, which is that Cecilia and Robbie never came back together, with nonreality to give a happy ending, which consequently makes her an untrustworthy narrator.

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In short it is when other texts shape this text's meaning. For example when the author derives and transforms previous texts into his own text.

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Postmodernism started in the second half of the 20th century. Postmodernism is when literature work takes on new qualities and characteristics that it did not possess in earlier decades. Postmodernist writers aimed to challenge traditional literary 'rules' as a result of exploring their feelings about key events which happened in their life.