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Contemporary Women's Writing Advance Access published online on July 31, 2009
Contemporary Women's Writing, doi:10.1093/cww/vpp008
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Invisible Author? Christine Brooke-Rose's Absent Presence

Andrew Williamson

University of Queensland, Australia a.williamson@uq.edu.au

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.


   "Writing-Reading": Thru
 
It is safe to say that it is for Thru, her unapologetic departure from realist convention, that Christine Brooke-Rose has developed a reputation as one of Britain's most difficult and abstruse authors. First published in 1975, Thru was met with unforgiving reviews; it baffled its contemporary critics and has continued to baffle for over thirty years. In 1993, Brooke-Rose perplexedly states that at the time "not even critics were following what I was doing" (Seed 250). However, she has elsewhere conceded that Thru is the only one of her novels that she can understand her readers finding difficult; it is a text, she says, for which she "was expectedly rapped on the creative knuckles" ("Illicitations" 103).1 Such a demanding text, however, should not have been entirely unanticipated from an author who is, today, celebrated as one of the leading practitioners of the experimental novel in . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   The Death of the Author ...
 

   ... and the Resurrection of Christine Brooke-Rose
 

   "Who is Speaking?": Characterization in Thru
 

   Work and Text, Work as Text: Brooke-Rose's Typographical Play
 

   On Tradition and Experiment
 

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