This was his first publication since the release of The Satanic Verses, which was the spark that set off the Islamic world, and it therefore holds significant relevance to his crisis.
With this edict hovering over Rushdie's head Haroun and the Sea of Stories takes a more transient role in his literary time line and covertly addresses many issues in the literary genre of metafiction. On a fundamental level metafiction is described as fiction about fiction, but more intrinsically it is a piece of writing that contains a self-referential element. The topic of metafiction in the post-modernist era of writing has certainly gained a lot of talk, but authors have long written in a way as to make the reader take an introspective and self-conscience look at their work. Don Quixote, and even Shakespeare's Hamlet, have been labeled as containing elements of metafiction; and in this regard some critics claim that the definitions for metafiction, and their application, are too broad to be used with much precision. Patricia Waugh, in her book Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-conscious Fiction, defines metafiction as "fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality" (2). The gray area then becomes how to differentiate classical writing that contains elements of self-reflexivity from post-modernist contemporary writing which aims to respond to social agenda. .
It is hard to explain this book in any other manner than by saying it is "fantastic" or "fantastical." The honest truth is that Salman Rushdie's novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories falls under the form of fiction writing that is often referred to as 'magic-realism.' The literary term started out in the art world in the early 1920's to help define a new post-expressionist form of painting that was emerging, but it has since been adapted to include works of literature which expertly meld fantasy with realism, in such a way as to treat the fantastic as normal.
