Metanarrative

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 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)."

Synonyms

All synonyms
grand narrative

Example

More examples

"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)."

Etymology

From meta- (“transcending; of a level above”) + narrative (“recitation of a story”).

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.