Fantasy and metafictionality in Walter Moers' Zamonien Novels

Abstract

Walter Moers is one of the most important authors of contemporary Fantastic Literature in German. Since his first novel, in 1999, the author turned into a bestselling writer. His last six novels all share a common element: the fictive continent of "Zamonien", a fantastic world created by Moers. In this invented world the reader finds a lot of adventures, battles, journeys, conquests, mysteries, fights, dangers, unusual creatures and unknown places. If on one hand, the fantastic works of Moers respond to conventions of the Fantasy genre, on the other hand, they offer a new literary proposal, which breaks some conventions of this genre. This is particularly the case of the metafictional elements, which are very frequent in his novels. This paper intends to introduce a novel of Walter Moers, Die Stadt der träumenden Bücher (2004), and to discuss its constitutive elements, which classify the book as a work in the Fantasy genre, emphasizing especially the metafictional aspects .