Abstract
<p> Focussing on four forms appearing in the novels of Brooke-Rose, Quin and Brophy – the frame, the circuit, flesh or formlessness, and the chiasmus – this book outlines a situation of increasing visuality in their works across the 1960s and 70s. By reading the visual aspects of their novels – from the thematisation of vision and visuality in the early works, to more typographically innovative techniques in the later years – it highlights the ways in which these novels might be deemed ‘indisciplined’, a term chosen for its connotations of both interdisciplinarity and rule-breaking, iconoclasm, or delinquency. At the same time, these authors begin to pose questions about literary and social forms, and possible relationships between the two; challenging literary discipline and the novel form, these writers also refuse to conform to social expectations of what the ‘woman writer’ will produce. With the question of form currently coming back into critical interest, <italic>The Visual Novel</italic> revisits the work of the 1960s and 70s – a period also in the midst of critical revival – as supremely edifying to this ongoing conversation about literary forms and social experience, about the possibilities for disrupting disciplinary space through writing, and rewriting. As the first sustained study of visuality in the works of these three authors, and the only book to treat their works in tandem, <italic>The Visual Novel</italic> asserts the continued relevance of these three important, but often overlooked, authors to discussions of visual form in writing, aesthetics and politics, and the concept of disciplinarity more widely. </p>