Zadie Smith and the Genre of the Novel | Harvard University

This course is useful for students of contemporary British literature, students interested in the form of the novel, and students who are interested in minority writers. Zadie Smith's four major novels—White Teeth (2000), On Beauty (2005), N.W. (2012), and Swing Time (2016) all tell their own stories and confront issues such as the intersections of racial and class inequality, global economics, legacies of the past, the results of industrial modernization, and the nature of the responsibilities shared among individuals and communities. Each of these also takes up the traditional literary structures of the novel in different ways, sometimes directly inquiring into the politics and history of the genre of the novel. As we move through her oeuvre, we can see that her changing forms and styles all serve to test the continued efficacy of the novel form she has inherited—how can the novel still function to imagine community and provide ethical compass, she seems to ask, in the contemporary world? How is it narrating not a history but multiple histories? Can it adequately rely on the concept of reconciliation to the whole in an age of global displacement, shadow economies, and vast disparities in individual agency? In this course we closely examine four of Smith's novels with an eye to her themes and to her aesthetics as well as to her place in contemporary literature. Zadie Smith was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002, and was one of Granta's 20 Best Young British Novelists in 2003 and again in 2013. White Teeth won awards including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award. On Beauty was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and received the Orange Prize for Fiction, and NW was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Smith is the recipient of the 2021 St. Louis Literary Award.