Covidian Metamorphoses: Art and the Poetics of Transformation in Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet
Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016), coined “the first Brexit novel”, relied on a very “time-sensitive” publication schedule: weeks after the manuscript had been submitted, the book was already published, documenting almost in real-time the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. The remaining three volumes o...
Saved in:
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | deu |
| Published: |
Scientia Publishing House
2021-11-01
|
| Series: | Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Philologica |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://acta.sapientia.ro/content/docs/covidian-metamorphoses-art-and-the-poeti.pdf |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| Summary: | Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016), coined “the first Brexit novel”, relied
on a very “time-sensitive” publication schedule: weeks after the manuscript
had been submitted, the book was already published, documenting almost
in real-time the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. The remaining three
volumes of the Seasonal Quartet (Winter, 2017; Spring, 2019; Summer,
2020) also followed a similarly tight schedule; hence the last piece of the
collection, published in the summer of 2020, could already reflect on yet
another crisis: that of the COVID-19 pandemic and the first lockdown
in Britain. The Quartet offers art as a vital coping mechanism for such
critical times, but the present paper argues that the function of art in the
Quartet is even more pervasive than that. The sequence’s entire poetics of
transformation is founded on art as a mediatized means of experiencing the
world, which is then turned into a rhetoric of transformation. The paper
traces the three main motifs of the Quartet: that of the tree, the stone, and
the cloud/sky to look at how their art-based transformations create a sense
of connectedness in the four novels. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 2067-5151 2068-2956 |