Christine Brooke-Rose and Contemporary Fiction

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 as Out and Xorandor, 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.