Christine Brooke-Rose

CBR 's literary output includes five books of criticism and literary theory, sixteen novels, a collection of short stories, poetry, and an autobiography. She was an influential twentieth-century critic and theorist, and she is a marvellously playful and difficult novelist, pushing the limits of narration and representation. It can be grouped into three periods: the early satiric novels, the discourse novels, and the human-technology novels. These variously subvert the conventions of realist fiction through linguistic distortions (punning, misquotations), discursive grafting, and polysemous narration. The Dictionary of Literary Biography judges that, while her work does not adhere to any single mode or school of expression, she can be regarded as postmodernist in the sense that her novels align themselves with aspects of cybernetics, gender consciousness, and forms of intertextuality.