Christine Brooke-Rose and Contemporary Fiction [Hardcover]

Christine Brooke-Rose is one of the most innovative and yet critically neglected of contemporary British writers. In this first full-length study of her work, Sarah Birch provides a comprehensive reading of her writing, from her early realist work to the experimental fictions of novels such asOutandXorandor, and situates it in the context of contemporary developments in literature and literary theory. Birch asks why a novelist who has been so highly praised by critics is nevertheless excluded from the contemporary canon, and shows how Brooke-Rose's position on the borders of European and British cultures raises key questions concerning the notion of a national tradition and of literary postmodernism.

[Birch] deserves a bouquet for the wit and invention with which she conveys the artistry of her profound, polyphonic subject. --Choice