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Zadie Smith’s fiction reimagines subjectivity, relationality, and the conditions of contemporary life.
This book offers a timely reassessment of her work, addressing identity, urban experience, and the category of the human. Moving beyond postcolonial and multiculturalist readings, it brings psychoanalytic, historical, symptomatic, and cultural materialist perspectives to bear across her novels, stories, essays, and plays. The collection explores how Smith’s characters, shaped by diverse backgrounds and settings, challenge fixed ideas of Britishness and personhood. It argues that her writing opens up a new ontological space—defined by fluid identities, shifting subjectivities, and evolving forms of relationality.
By reconsidering both the human and the spatial in Smith’s work, the book makes a valuable contribution to contemporary literary criticism and to current thinking on narrative, identity, and urban life.
Introduction: new relationalities in Zadie Smith’s works – Nurten Birlik and Noémi Albert
1 Almost twenty years old: retrospection, belatedness and nostalgia in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) – Philip Tew
2 Can we really escape the past?: cultural memory and motherhood in Zadie Smith’s
Novel White Teeth – Gülrenk Hayircil
3 “I mourn, therefore I am”: textualization of grief in The Autograph Man – Cansu Özge Özmen
4 “I could not get from him what I wanted”: on family, fragments and foundations in “Hanwell in Hell” – Lewis MacLeod
5 Reading otherness and finding beauty in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty – Aurel Mure?an
6 The challenges of (new) cosmopolitanism: Zadie Smith’s NW as contemporary urban epic – Gönül Bakay
7 Incompetent mothers and the ‘good enough’ father in Smith’s Swing Time – Nurten Birlik and Meltem Yilmaz
8 From London to New York - at the juncture of spaces and selves: Zadie Smith’s Grand Union: Stories – Noémi Albert
9 “Contested spaces,” conflict, and stability: the socio-structural politics of urban spaces in Zadie Smith’s selected essays – Manasvini Rai
10 Reflections on Zadie Smith’s 2020 Intimations: a social- historical analysis – Viktória Hucsek and Lívia Szélpál
11 Zadie Smith: mastering the art of the short story – Tracey L. Walters
12 The Wife of Willesden: a subversive subject position – Nurten Birlik