Zadie Smith's Forsterian Ethics:White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty

On being queer and postcolonial: Reading Zadie Smith’s NW through Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

“…This is a critically misguided attitude to take with the work of a writer whose fiction always entails a systematic departure from her previous formal endeavours. As Fiona Tolan (2013) surveys, Smith's fiction to date is not only permeated with references to her explicitly disclaimed literary forefathers, such as E.M. Forster,2 but is also peppered with more oblique allusions to the influential work of British, British Asian and American writers such as Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers. In the same vein, NW enacts the imprint of previous literature, in this case the persisting legacies of a modernist envisioning of London after the First World War.…”