ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Woman’s World (2005) – with its cut-up structure, visual heterogeneity and exclusive reliance on borrowed material – is the formal quintessence of collage literature. Its sustained narrative unity, however, makes it a highly paradoxical text – fragmentary and appropriative as well as curiously coherent. The chapter begins with a brief introduction to Rawle’s sustained commitment to collage in his visual as well as literary works. Following an examination of the collage-like properties of his second novel, it considers how the interaction between form and content – a story of a small-town English delivery driver Roy impersonating his dead sister Norma by wearing her clothes and constructing an image of femininity on the basis of 1960s women’s magazines – can be read as a representation of myriad crises of the self, particularly in the context of gender and consumerism.
