Zadie Smith

New perspectives

Nurten Birlik, Noémi Albert

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781526177742
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526177735
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Series editors’ preface
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: New relationalities in Zadie Smith’s works
• 1 Retrospection, belatedness, and nostalgia in White Teeth
• 2 Can we really escape the past? Cultural memory and motherhood in White Teeth
• 3 ‘I mourn, therefore I am’: textualization of grief in The Autograph Man
• 4 ‘I could not get from him what I wanted’: on family, fragments, and foundations in ‘Hanwell in Hell’
• 5 Reading otherness and finding beauty in On Beauty
• 6 The challenges of (new) cosmopolitanism: NW as contemporary urban epic
• 7 Incompetent mothers and the ‘good enough’ father in Swing Time
• 8 From London to New York—at the juncture of spaces and selves: Grand Union: Stories
• 9 ‘Contested spaces’, conflict, and stability: the socio-structural politics of urban spaces in Zadie Smith’s selected essays
• 10 Reflections on Intimations: a social-historical analysis
• 11 Mastering the art of the short story
• 12 The Wife of Willesden: a subversive subject position
• Index