self-referential

Etymology

self- +‎ referential.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈsɛlf ɹɛfəˈɹɛnʃl/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈsɛlf ˌɹɛfəˈɹɛn(t)ʃəl/
• Hyphenation: self-re‧fer‧ent‧ial

Adjective

self-referential (comparative more self-referential, superlative most self-referential)

1. That or who refers to itself or oneself.
   • 1854 March 15, The Musical Times, volume 5, page 394:

     He might answer that he did, and that his poetry was full of enjoyment. But it is not; at least not in the entirely happy, familiar, unmisgiving, self-referential, and yet not self-loving sense that we speak of.

   • 2017 October 27, Alex McLevy, “Making a Killing: The Brief Life and Bloody Death of the Post-Scream Slasher Revival”, in The A.V. Club‎, archived from the original on 5 March 2018:

     What makes Scream so effective, and so timeless, is that it’s both a winking and self-referential breakdown of the tropes of the horror genre and a nearly flawless embodiment of the same.

2. (specifically) In a literary work: referring to the author or the author's other works.
   • 1991, Edmund J. Smyth, Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction, B. T. Batsford Ltd.:

     Many women authors extend the sort of metafictional self-scrutiny which The Golden Notebook so extensively sustains: Eva Figes's novels, for example, often raise self-referential questioning of their own representational validity and Muriel Spark teases several of her heroines with unsettling awareness of the process of their own creation.