metanarrative

plural metanarratives · alternative meta-narrative

1. A narrative which concerns narratives of historical meaning, experience or knowledge and offers legitimation of such through the anticipated completion of some master idea; a grand story that is self-legitimizing.

   The narratives are important in themselves as significant pieces of the metanarrative of suspicion in which activist politics have been embedded since the McCarthy era (with roots much earlier).

   2004, Sandra Baringer, The Metanarrative of Suspicion in Late Twentieth-Century America, Taylor & Francis (Routledge), page 18

   2 more examples

   Even the richest metanarratives of finitude cannot ultimately explain themselves, for they have no way to synoptically do so: a larger metanarrative, one rooted in the metaphysical, is required.

   2009, William E. Marsh, Nothingness, Metanarrative, and Possibility, AuthorHouse, page 199

   That is not to say that Snakewalk departs from the metanarrative of blindness completely, or even substantially, but rather that it contains much detail that is evidently informed by experiential knowledge.

   2014, David Bolt, The Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing, University of Michigan Press, page 130

   Synonyms: grand narrative

alternative meta-narrative

1. not comparableOf or relating to a metanarrative.