Word-Worlds: Language, Identity and Reality in the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose

With her output of fifteen novels (including Between, 1968; Amalgamemnon, 1984; and Subscript, 1999), three major critical works (including her authoritative study A Grammar of Metaphor, 1958) and a plethora of articles and essays, as well as poetry and a few extraordinary translations, Christine Brooke-Rose has extended the scope of the novel and stretched the possibilities of language to its limit, offering an insightful representation of our society. Beginning with an analysis of her early novels, Word-Worlds provides an overview of her fictional work and consolidates her position as a major contemporary author. Showing how her wide range of interests and various narrative modalities make it difficult to place her in a specific cultural and geographical tradition, this book considers the various intellectual influences that this bilingual, cross-cultural novelist has undergone, and by approaching her fiction from a variety of critical angles, it analyses her attitude towards language and the way in which she has questioned the notions of identity and reality proposed by Western tradition over the centuries.