Refusing the Form of “A Classical Campus Novel”: Experiment, Revolution and Gender in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Thru

This chapter interrogates in what ways Christine Brooke-Rose's Thru responds to and subverts the genre of the ‘campus novel’, in particular the British campus novel of post-WII era. As Showalter has noted, women often only appear in the background in these novels, ‘as students, as eccentric dons and dames, and especially as faculty wives’. Thru provides a stark counter-example to this recurring trope in the British mid-twentieth century campus novel and this chapter will pay particular attention to the ways in which the narrative’s experimentation playfully destabilises ideas surrounding gender and/in the academy.

ISBN: 978 94 014 6309 6

Publication year:2021