Zadie Smith - (Twenty-First Century Perspectives) by Nurten Birlik & Noémi Albert (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

Zadie Smith's fiction reimagines subjectivity, relationality, and the conditions of contemporary life.

This book offers a timely and significant reassessment of Smith's work, foregrounding questions of identity, urban space, and the category of the human. While previous studies have often centred on postcolonial or multiculturalist frameworks, this collection brings fresh critical perspectives to bear, including psychoanalytic, historical, symptomatic, and cultural materialist approaches, which illuminate new sites of meaning across her writing. The volume explores how Smith's characters, drawn from diverse backgrounds, challenge dominant definitions of Britishness and unsettle fixed models of personhood. Through an examination of the shifting subjectivities and spatial imaginaries in her fiction, it argues that Smith opens up a new ontological terrain: one shaped by fluid identities and relational becomings rather than stable, inherited positions.

By rethinking both the human and the city in Smith's fiction, the book makes an important contribution to contemporary literary criticism and to the evolving study of London as a lived and imagined space.

About the Author

Nurten Birlik is a Senior Instructor of English Literature in the Department of Foreign Language Education at Middle East Technical University
Noémi Albert is a Lecturer at the Institute of English Studies, University of Pécs (PTE)