Hypertext's earliest works all reckoned with their own creation (and their creators) in similar ways. The very idea of reading hypertext was so new ten years ago that the text had to justify its own existence in order to thrive. Texts like Michael Joyce's afternoon and Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden are as much theoretical as they are fictional or literary. This was partly because authors like Joyce and Moulthrop locate their predecessors in literary theory. But it was also because in writing in a new medium those authors had to instantiate a vision of hypertext that, until their time, had only been (for the most part) ethereal. The lifeblood of these texts are the theoretical ideas we see throughout them, not just as literary experiment or theoretical testing ground, but literally in theoretical passages. They explicitly justify their own existence by being reflexive and metafictive. These are hypertexts about the field of hypertext, and most of all their own textual blood and bones.

Yet, even now that hypertext has gained some critical ground and established more of an identity for itself, there are still reflexive and metafictional qualities in texts outside of the canon. Of most interest here is the persistence of hyper-reflexivity in works that experiment with the form of hypertext. It's a logical connection; many people consider the whole of hypertext itself an experiment. The conclusion I draw is that while some elements of hypertext may be expanding, if both works in the inner and outer spaces of the medium are metafictional, this quality may be an inherent part of hypertextual writing.