Introduction

Abstract This book is the first full-length study of the novels of Christine Brooke-Rose. It aims to provide a coherent overview of her fictional muvre and to map her place in the field of contemporary literature. Brooke-Rose has been widely recognized as one of Britain’s most innovative contemporary writers. The dismantling of systems, conventions, and readers’ expectations is at the heart of all her fiction; the goal of her novels is to teach people to see things anew, to look behind the discursive and social systems which naturalize convention, and to question this process of naturalization. It is not surprising, then, that she should be a difficult novelist to categorize. Indeed, despite the fact that she is a British writer, Brooke-Rose has been consistently identified with the nouveau roman and subsequent movements in the French novel since she began writing criticism of contemporary French fiction in the 1960s. I shall examine why this has been so, to what extent it is a relevant classification, and what an alternative approach might entail.