Beauty does not rest in the forms we encounter it, or match with the idea we have of it. The young Karl Marx writes that ‘the eye’s object is different from the ear’s’, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, that ‘when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it’. Beauty happens in this difficult gulf between hand and eye, between eye and ear. This essay approaches the problem of beauty through the dialogue between Zadie Smith and E. M. Forster, as conducted in Smith’s 2006 novel On Beauty. In staging her novel as a reprise of Forster’s Howards End, Smith enacts the taking place of the artwork in the duplications it urges on us, as beauty ‘brings copies of itself into being’ (Elaine Scarry). Beauty eludes expression; but in the ground that lies between On Beauty and Howards End, this essay looks for a kind of critical language and a kind of political institution in which the idea of beauty might find expression.

This chapter describes some of the salient characteristics of the ‘preface essay’, a form with a long history that has not received sustained critical attention. With reference to existing theories of the preface by Gérard Genette and Jacques Derrida as well as important examples of the form by authors mainly in the English literary tradition, ranging from John Dryden, through William Wordsworth, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and to Zadie Smith, this chapter provides a conceptual framework for authorial preface essays, their generic characteristics, and what they reveal about the relationship between the prefatorial and the essayistic. It will argue that the preface essay is a space of authorial self-crafting that attains durability and literary value by combining aspects of the prefatorial, such as its dependence on the work it prefaces and its occasionality, with the essayistic movement from the specific to the general, and the particular to the abstract.

From Francis Bacon to Zadie Smith, British essayists have played a crucial role in defining and interrogating the idea of transatlantic essayism. Not to be confused with its American form, which has been central to the promotion of exceptionalist cultural ideology in the United States from the Puritans to the present, British transatlantic essayism came into its own in the early twentieth century. Beginning with an account of D.H. Lawrence’s essays and their critical engagement with Americanness, this chapter explores the development of transatlantic essayism in the work of key essayists for whom the Anglo-American context has been of central importance, including W.H. Auden, Christopher Hitchens, Pico Iyer, Martin Amis, and Zadie Smith. What emerges is both a history of British transatlantic essayism and an account of the ways in which it continues to complicate our sense of the modern essay’s development on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond.

Aside from its intellectual content, the essay provides a space for contemporary British novelists to enhance their career prospects. This takes the threefold forms of intertexual affiliation by co-publication within the same title as other writers; of creating a space in which to generate prestige-enhancing controversy; and of enabling novelists to hold academic affiliations. This chapter examines these features through a network analysis of the publications in The London Review of Books over the past two decades and then through case studies of Hilary Mantel, Will Self, Tom McCarthy, and Zadie Smith.

In this chapter I read a range of Zadie Smith’s fiction and nonfiction prose to look at how Zadie Smith’s corpus testifies to an agon between the writer’s prerogative of impersonality and elective affinities and the “dark and unarguable blackness” that relentlessly attaches to raced bodies. The novels and non-fiction ask to be read not as global theory or interventionist polemic but as battlefields in themselves. Reading Zadie Smith according to the terms set up by Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall could also be crucial for decolonizing hard-bitten reading habits in the classroom that treat Black literature as interchangeable with Black culture and society. While Smith’s writing of this culture and society is immersive, she routinely and systematically problematizes the category of Blackness itself, choosing instead to imaginatively recreate the vicissitudes of identity at the intersections of race and class.

The chapter on words shows that even when mimicking worn-out, hackneyed speech styles, the vitality of creative language use can rescue wording from those atmospheres – of marketing and of politicking, for example – where language has become tired and predictable. The chapter considers the play of chance in any formation of wording, as the unruliness of graphemes and phonemes contributes over and above semantics. It shows that words are activated by syntax as they pass into phrases and that style emerges from the unpredictable influence of their scriptive, acoustic and etymological properties.

Critical responses to the home frequently imagined by nineteenth- and twentieth-century feminist writing suggest that the domestic is too compromised for a twenty-first-century feminist imaginary. Contemporary feminist dialogues are increasingly alert to the politics of the domestic and its resistance to transformational politics. Yet feminist writing has not relinquished the domestic as a site or language for imagining feminist possibility and practice. If anything, we have seen a proliferation of feminist writing interested in the domestic since the beginning of the twenty-first century. This chapter turns to three literary novels spanning the century so far: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005),Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home (2011), and Miranda July’s First Bad Man(2015). In each novel, the homeas literary institution, holiday villa, and single-woman’s houseoffers a focal point for questions about feminist imagining that gives shape to specific textual strategies, suggesting that if twenty-first-century feminism cannot relinquish the domestic, we must learn to dwell in its compromised politics.