Ellie Byrne is Senior Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, where she teaches contemporary literature. She has published on Hilary Mantel, Nicola Barker, Ali Smith and on questions of borders, hospitality, queer theory, Brexit and migration.
Alex J. Calder teaches modern and contemporary literature across the University of Cambridge, UK. He has published on Ali Smith, Max Porter, and Eley Williams in relation to experimental fiction, art writing, creative criticism, intertextuality, affect, and socio-political issues.
Ali Smith: Critical Essays offers a comprehensive critical study of Ali Smith´s literary works. It brings together contributions by international scholars to explore the significance of her innovative writing and its transformative impact in Scottish and British literature.
Ali Smith is renowned as an exciting and inventive writer who addresses current political realities while pushing at the boundaries of experimental writing and literary innovation. This collection addresses the full range of Smith´s writing: from her early plays and fiction in the 1980s and 1990s through to her multi award-winning novels across the twenty-first century, as well as her influential critical writing, her lectures, and her prolific introductions to other writers. Smith´s pluralistic literary style ranges across discussions about literature, visual art, contemporary politics, childhood, gender and sexuality, literary criticism, nationality, borders, and the environment. Interweaving the personal, the political, and the aesthetic, Smith´s writing combines these layers to demonstrate the invigorating possibilities of contemporary literature.
This book offers expert close readings of all of Smith´s major works to date and is aimed at students and scholars of contemporary British fiction, Scottish literature, contemporary women´s writing, queer literature and literary experimentation.
List of Figures; List of Contributors; Foreword – Ali Smith; Acknowledgements; Introduction: A Portrait of the Artist; 1. Ali Smith as Playwright: Metatheatrical Potentiality and Political Agency - Alex J. Calder; 2. Devolution, Deviance: Sexuality and Space in Ali Smith´s Early Fiction - Timothy C. Baker; 3. "In the actual flesh”: Embodiment in Ali Smith´s Work - Monika Szuba; 4. Artful Sweetness: Twee Aesthetics in Ali Smith´s Short Stories - Alice Bennett; 5. Swerves and Seers: Children and Childhood in Ali Smith - Jenny Bavidge; 6. Renarration as Ethical Mythmaking: Ali Smith´s Queer Relationality in Girl Meets Boy - Domenico Di Rosa; 7. Architectural Narratives: Cloistral Form and Traumatic Process in There but for the - Ginette Carpenter; 8. Noisy Communication in There but for the and How to be both - Dong Xia; 9. "Attempt, essay, offering”: Artful´s Experiments in "Uncritical Reading” - Kaye Mitchell; 10. Ali Smith´s Introductions and Forewords - Charlotte Terrell; 11. "Arty Art”: Ali Smith and the Feminist Avant-Garde - Catriona McAra; 12. The State That We Are In: Improvising Aesthetics in the Moment Between Autumn and Winter - John Havard; 13. The Limit-of-the-Nation Novel: Internal Borders in Ali Smith´s Seasonal Quartet - Peter Ely; 14. "I am the child who´s been buried in leaves”: The Spectral Child in Ali Smith´s Seasonal Quartet - Lucy Arnold; 15. The Unseasonal Quintet: Reading for the Weather in Summer and Companion Piece - Ellie Byrne; Afterword: Allegorising the Contemporary in Gliff and Glyph - Ellie Byrne and Alex J. Calder; Index
