Inclusion/Critique: Invoking European Modernism in Zadie Smith’s NW

Abstract

In 2012, Zadie Smith published her sweeping, experimental novel of London, NW. Perhaps unsurprisingly, its playful wordplay, urban mappings, and fractured form have prompted comparisons to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, as well as to the work of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot. This essay argues that Zadie Smith, among other contemporary writers of color, responds to an awareness that reviewers, critics, and readers would compare her work to European literary modernism. Such awareness allows her to offer in her 2012 novel, NW, an implicit guide to the risks and limits of such comparisons.