Abstract
This chapter argues that the vast majority of Zadie Smith’s short stories are concerned with a revision of Englishness. They respond to the ‘English Question’ and challenge preconceived notions of English communal identity. Like Kay’s and some of Saadi’s stories, they interrupt the myth of a nation’s substantial ‘common being’ and expose the accidental, i.e. non-essentialist, constructed, mutable, and ultimately inoperative nature of English community. Jansen demonstrates that a characteristic of Smith’s short stories is the use of homodiegetic narrators, whose indirect, limited, and sometimes unreliable knowledge of the depicted events reflects the subjective construction of English community on a narratological level. Smith’s homodiegetic narratives illustrate “the production of the nation as narration” (Homi Bhabha) and they underpin that there are as many kinds of Englishness as there are witness accounts of English communal identity.
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Jansen, B. (2018). Accidental Englishness: Zadie Smith. In: Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94860-7_9
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