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'. The result is an extended meditation in a highly personal idiom, on the creative act and its relation to modern theoretical writing and thinking. Like her fiction, Professor Brooke-Rose's criticism is self-consciously experimental, trying out and discarding ideas, adopting others. Her linguistic prowess, her uncommon role as a recognised writer of fiction and theory and the relevance of her work to the feminist and other other movements, all contribute to the interest of this unusual sequence of essays.

"A distinguished work...Although Brooke-Rose compares with anybody in her mastery of every aspect of modern literary theory, and in the highly professional character of her own contributions, she always writes in a distinctively personal way. There are some remarkably fine things in this collection." Frank Kermode

"What makes this an especially interesting miscellany is that it is about 'both literary theory and creativity,' offering the insights of a writer who is both a novelist and a critic....on the whole this work reveals the intelligence, erudition, and creativity of a remarkable novelist and critic." Alice Kaminsky, International Studies in Philosophy