SOURCE: Hawkins, Susan E. “Innovation/History/Politics: Reading Christine Brooke-Rose's Amalgamemnon.” Contemporary Literature 32, no. 1 (spring 1991): 58-74.

In the following essay, Hawkins asserts that Amalgamemnon confronts dominant male postmodern literary discourse through Brooke-Rose's innovative strategies of semantic play, multiple discursive modes, and displaced point-of-view.

Beginning with Out in 1964, followed by Such in 1966 and Between in 1968, Christine Brooke-Rose moved very quickly from her own versions of the French New Novel to patently radical experiments in metafiction. And even though she appeared to have “arrived” with the publication of Thru in 1975—she was the subject of one of Contemporary Literature's quarterly interviews in 1976—this “arrival” has proved more apparent than actual. As Morton P. Levitt comments, Brooke-Rose “points the way to what might have proved a fruitful path for English fiction in the period following World War II. Instead, her career as critic and novelist demonstrates further the sad insularity...