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Zadie Smith’s Intimations: The Idea of the Ambient Essay

Mayne, R; (2021) Zadie Smith’s Intimations: The Idea of the Ambient Essay. [Review]. Moveable Type , 13 (1) , Article 15. 10.14324/111.1755-4527.120. Green open access

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Abstract

Following the devastating global crisis of the First World War, Virginia Woolf noted in ‘The Modern Essay’ (1919), that ‘the essay is alive; there is no reason to despair’. Just over one hundred years later, in the middle of another global crisis, Zadie Smith’s collection of essays, Intimations (2020), reassures us once again of the ongoing social significance of the essay and the continued existence of readerships happy to receive it in newspapers, magazines and books. While the short essays in Smith’s collection lack the size of the late-Victorian essays Woolf would have feasted on, they, much like Smith’s earlier collections: Feel Free: Essays (2018) and Changing my Mind: Occasional Essays (2009), do not lack sonority. Operating as a collection of ambient essays, that is essays immersed in the ‘here and now’ and taking place in the shared world of the everyday, Smith’s collection finds its counterpart in the Woolfian essay. These ambient texts produced by Woolf and Smith are not simply situated in a world of voices outside the self, but also encompassed /enveloped by porous boundaries, and enter into dialogue with uncontrollable external circumstances, thereby facilitating reflections on the socio-political environs of the wider world.

Type: Article
Title: Zadie Smith’s Intimations: The Idea of the Ambient Essay
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.14324/111.1755-4527.120
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.1755-4527.120
Language: English
Additional information: © 2021 Rhonda Mayne. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) 4.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Keywords: Intimations, Zadie Smith, Virginia Woolf, essay, ambient texts, ambient literature, ambience
URI: https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10138475
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