Interesting, the MacGuffin in The Legend of the Seeker is The Book of Counted Shadows.
Anybody ever find an unexpurgated version of The Princess Bride By S. Morgenstern?
You are correct, what I am talking about is the self-referential nature of a character naming the actual work of fiction they are participating in as a character. These examples have been fun but I hope there are even more.
Thanks,
AllFree
Here’s one: in Samuel R. Delany’s novel Dhalgren, the Kid writes in a notebook, which includes passages from Dhalgren.
Here’s one that kind of matches - Peter Straub wrote a series of books in which a character, Timothy Underhill, either appeared, or was the protagonist. One of the books is called Lost Boy, Lost Girl, in which he documents a crime: The supposed abduction of his nephew by a serial killer, and Underhill’s struggle (eventually successful) to save his nephew.
In the next book In the Night Room, Straub reveals that Underhill (the character) had written Lost Boy, Lost Girlas a coping mechanism, since his nephew was presumed dead, his body having never been found. So he wrote the last book as a way to both deal with his nephew’s death, and provide some kind of rationalization and backstory for the serial killer.
Although the real mind-f**k of In the Night Room is that one of the characters Underhill is creating for his newest novel slips into the real world, and happens to be writing a book called In the Night Room. Confused yet? It’s waay better than it sounds, though.
As a seque from the Straub reference, Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series references itself and its writer, and involves itself and him in the plot.
Flan O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds has characters that the main character (a writer) writes about come to life when he falls asleep.
As in Spaceballs, there’s a whole bunch of comedy movies that refer to themselves as movies – characters reading the script of the movie to figure out what happens next, etc. – The Muppet Movie is the first one that springs to my mind; I’m pretty sure at least one of the Scary Movie series does something like that.
And in (mostly) non-comedy, the play Deathtrap is more ore less about characters writing a play called Deathtrap with the same plot as the events they’re acting out.
In the book House of Leaves, one of the main characters reads a book by that title to pass the time, and ends up burning pages of it for light to keep reading by. The book-within-the-(real world)-book is also called “House of Leaves” but IIRC the book that’s being read by a character isn’t the same thing.
In the Wiki article, it’s suggested that “leaves” in the book’s title also refers to pages, and considering the labyrinthine construction of both the titular house and the book, I can see the parallel.