The Visual NovelChristine Brooke-Rose, Ann Quin, Brigid Brophy

• Provides an account of the growing conceptualism and interdisciplinarity across art forms in the 1960s and 70s, offering detailed original readings of the novels of Brooke-Rose, Quin and Brophy, with particular attention to visual and formal aspects which have been thus far overlooked
• Situates the work of Brooke-Rose, Quin and Brophy in relation to developments in the visual arts, and the growing philosophical and intellectual interest in visual perception
• Develops a new understanding of visuality as it relates to literary study, incorporating not only typographical experiment and the use of illustrations, but also treatments of materiality and the body
• Theorises literary ‘indiscipline’, identifying possibilities for politicised readings of experimental form
• Connects 1960s-70s literary experiments to recent and contemporary text-image work

The Visual Novel situates the work of Christine Brooke-Rose, Ann Quin and Brigid Brophy in relation to developments in the visual arts. Focusing on four forms recurring in the novels of these authors – frames, circuits, flesh and crossings – it outlines a trend of increasing visuality throughout the 1960s and 70s as Brooke-Rose, Quin and Brophy began to pose questions about literary and social forms, and the possible relationships between the two. With questions of form coming back into critical interest, Hilary White revisits the work of these decades to develop a new understanding of visuality as it relates to literary study and consider the potential for disrupting disciplinary space through writing and rewriting. As the first book to address the work of Brooke-Rose, Quin and Brophy in tandem, this volume asserts the continued relevance of these three important, but often overlooked, authors to discussions of visual form and (in)discipline in writing, aesthetics and politics.