Yeah you could apply the word to a story-in-a-story like The Princess Bride, which has a narrative about a boy hearing another story. The meta-narrative would be the story about the boy.
You don’t need to get recursive with the layers of fiction though. If you imagine a long-running many-hundreds-of-episodes tv show, the show will likely be divided into a number of distinct arcs, perhaps season-by-season. Each arc will have its own narrative, its own story beats, its own themes; but all the arcs will be tied together by a metanarrative, a narrative encompassing the other narratives.
Yeah you could apply the word to a story-in-a-story like The Princess Bride, which has a narrative about a boy hearing another story. The meta-narrative would be the story about the boy.
You don’t need to get recursive with the layers of fiction though. If you imagine a long-running many-hundreds-of-episodes tv show, the show will likely be divided into a number of distinct arcs, perhaps season-by-season. Each arc will have its own narrative, its own story beats, its own themes; but all the arcs will be tied together by a metanarrative, a narrative encompassing the other narratives.