SOURCE: Hansom, Paul. “Fictional Theories and Theoretical Fictions.” Contemporary Literature 34, no. 4 (winter 1993): 797-802.

In the following review, Hansom observes that Brooke-Rose's essays in Stories, Theories, and Things primarily address the intersection of literary theory and the fictionalizing process.

Lars Ole Sauerberg's Fact into Fiction: Documentary Realism in the Contemporary Novel is an interesting investigation of the realist documentary mode that also explores the relationship between textual ontology and the reliance on outer references from the “real” world. Sauerberg's basic claim is that despite the tendencies toward fragmentary narrative and literary devices (vaguely compounded as the postmodern), the realist mode of representation still prevails. Indeed, it must prevail, considering that we share much the same obsession with the ontological condition as our nineteenth-century cousins. The continuation of bourgeois values into the twentieth century has meant that literary investigation and experimentation, indeed all forms of representation, have followed the basic...