Instead, eighteenth-century literature was best concerned with identities—which might be defined, in a Hegelian sense, as the thoughts by which a person opposes knowledge. Such is the plot of the coming-of-age novel, in which a handsome young man—typically spurned by a handsome young woman who’s opted for marrying another, or death—sets out to find alternative meaning in life, which means, of course, himself. The Bildungsroman is often a closeted Künstlerroman or artist’s novel, as its protagonists are often the narrators (first person), and the narration frequently proceeds by letters addressed to friends or diary entries strictly for self, all of whom are metafictional proxies for the reader. Metafiction, literature conscious of its own literariness, is the belated sibling to canon and fugue, and mirror-play mise en abyme. But unlike in music or painting, autoawareness in literature must be accomplished in words, and so is not just acknowledged but also critiqued. Characters assume their own lives, quite apart from the stated intentions of their authors, and assume to comment on authorial plans and offer alternative prospects; their behaviors—obreptions, subreptions, editing peer characters (even if due only to the opportunities of epistolary structure), and passing among texts (Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random, and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, appearing as guests at a ball in John Kidgell’s The Card, 1755)—none are difficult to read as drafts of equivalent liberties in life.