The novelist and critic Christine Brooke-Rose investigates those difficult border zones between the 'invented' and the 'real' in fiction.

Preface; Acknowledgements; Part I. Theories as stories: 1. Stories, theories and things; 2. Whatever happened to narratology?; 3. Is is, is id?; Part II. Stories and style: 4. A for but: Hawthorne's 'The Custom-House'; 5. Ill locutions; 6. Ill logics of irony; 7. Ill wit and sick tragedy; 8. Cheng Ming Chi'I'd; 9. Notes on the metre of Auden's The Age of Anxiety; Part III. Theories of stories: 10. Fiction, figment, feign; 11. Which way did they go? Thataways; 12. Palimpsest history; 13. Illusions of parody; 14. Illusions of anti-realism; 15. A womb of one's own?; Part IV. Things?: 16. Woman as semiotic object; 17. Illiterations; 18. Ill wit and good humour; 19. An allegory of aesthetics; References; Index.