Aesthetic and Narrative Strategies in Ali Smith’s Quick-Response Literature. The Seasonal Quartet (2016-2020)

When the first books of her tetralogy Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), Spring (2019), Summer (2020) were published, Ali Smith repeatedly told the story behind the idea for the seasonal quartet: as she had been so late with handing in the manuscript of her novel How to be both (2014), her publisher had hardly any time to process it. Still, within only a few weeks, the book was printed. This gave Smith the idea of what she calls a ‘time-sensitive experiment’, i.e. novels that were written very close to their time of publication. Smith, both in interviews as well as in the form of intertextual references in her books, strongly associates her project with the Victorian way of publishing serialised fiction (roman-feuilleton), in particular with Charles Dickens’ writing. Like Dickens’ work, also Smith’s ‘quick-response literature’ is characterised by social and political engagement propagating more inclusive societies. The realtime writing/publishing, as it were, enables her to refer to social and political events that feel still ‘novel’ at the time of publication. At the same time, she succeeds in disclosing and creating relations between historically distanced events and persons, for instance by introducing intermedial references to artists, their biographies and works. In the proposed paper, I will analyse the aesthetic and narrative strategies Ali Smith applies in her swiftly written novels and ask how these strategies convey, communicate with and respond to the contemporaneousness of the texts. The books’ closeness to time is furthermore linked to their advocacy of inclusive societies based on the acceptance of the heterogeneity of its members (e.g. with regard to age, gender, religion, sexual orientation, personal interests etc.). In my paper, I would like to show how Ali Smith in the seasonal quartet both formally and in terms of contents strongly advocates this idea of inclusion.