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<p>Ali Smith’s <i>Seasonal Quartet</i> chronicles life in the age of Brexit, but her focus on contemporary events comprises an unexpected engagement with the medieval past. In particular, striking resonances between <i>Winter</i>, the second novel of Smith’s <i>Quartet</i>, and the Middle English poem <i>Sir Gawain and the Green Knight</i> foreground issues of hospitality, seasonality, and the motif of the evergreen, all of which Smith deploys to reveal the temporal heterogeneity of the present and the urgency of cultivating a complex historical consciousness. Smith’s engagement with the past, and with contemporary desire for the past, eschews nostalgia in favor of a model of seasonal ‘turning’ that insists on the certainty of change even as it also maintains the asynchronous endurance of the past in the present.</p>

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Ali Smith’s medieval romance

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2025年3月18日

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  • Rebecca Davis

摘要

Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet chronicles life in the age of Brexit, but her focus on contemporary events comprises an unexpected engagement with the medieval past. In particular, striking resonances between Winter, the second novel of Smith’s Quartet, and the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight foreground issues of hospitality, seasonality, and the motif of the evergreen, all of which Smith deploys to reveal the temporal heterogeneity of the present and the urgency of cultivating a complex historical consciousness. Smith’s engagement with the past, and with contemporary desire for the past, eschews nostalgia in favor of a model of seasonal ‘turning’ that insists on the certainty of change even as it also maintains the asynchronous endurance of the past in the present.