‘Groping Inside Language’: Translation, Humour and Experiment in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Between and Brigid Brophy’s In Transit

Published within a year of one another, Christine Brooke-Rose’s Between (1968) and Brigid Brophy’s In Transit (1969) are experimental anti-novels sharing a fascination with anti-realist narrative techniques. Each text explores the possibilities of linguistic playfulness and the ways in which a rigidly gendered language system might be ‘unsexed’ by trans-lingual wordplay, the subversion of literary genre and an attention to the mechanics of translation as both a semantic and ideological practice.