The Meta-Heteronym is a theoretical paper by Rex Fraction examining heteronymy as institutional technology. It uses Fernando Pessoa’s archive and Lee Sharks’s Pearl and Other Poems as comparative cases.
A system is defined as meta-heteronymic when differentiated personae not only write primary texts but also produce the reception apparatus around one another. The paper requires multiplicity, recursive paratext, several institutional genres, explicit self-theory, and shared literary-historical positioning. In such a system, heteronyms introduce, review, attack, defend, historicize, and canonize one another.
The essay argues that Pessoa’s prefaces, heteronym relations, magazines, publishing projects, manifestos, and archival trunk show an emergent form of this operation. It reads Pearl as a later explicit case in which the book contains its own fictive critics, histories, manifestos, bibliographies, and institutional ecology. The proposed inversion is that a text may generate later authorial positions rather than merely being produced by them. This is a typological and auto-philological argument, not an established consensus in Pessoa scholarship.