Bøker av Christine Brooke-Rose

The novelist and critic Christine Brooke-Rose reflects on her own fictional craft and turns her well-developed analytic abilities on other writers fictional and critical, from Hawthorne to Pound to Bloom and Derrida, in an attempt to investigate those difficult border zones between the 'invented' and the 'real'.

History and literature seem to be losing ground to the brave new world of electronic media and technology, and battle lines are being drawn between the humanities and technology, the first world and the third world, women and men. Narrator Mira Enketei erases those boundaries in her punning monologue, blurring the texts of Herodotus with the callers to a talk-radio program, and blending contemporary history with ancient: fairy-tale and literal/invented people (the kidnappers of capitalism, a girl-warrior from Somalia, a pop singer, a political writer), connected by an elaborate mock-genealogy stretching back to the Greek gods, move in and out of each other's stories. The narrator sometimes sees herself as Cassandra, condemned by Apollo to prophesy but never to be believed, enslaved by Agamemnon after the fall of Troy. Brooke-Rose amalgamates ancient literature with modern crises to produce a powerful novel about the future of culture.

Cutting across the wide field of 'fantastic' literature, Professor Brooke-Rose examines in a clear and precise way the essential differences between several 'fantastic' narratives against the background of realistic fiction. In doing so, she employs many of the methods of modern literary theory whilst retaining a sharp critical intuition.