Autumn, Winter, Never Spring: Ali Smith's Brexit Season

Byrne, Eleanor ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1976-0897 (2020) Autumn, Winter, Never Spring: Ali Smith's Brexit Season. The Open Arts Journal (8). ISSN 2050-3679

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Abstract

Abstract This essay discusses the depiction of the post –Brexit British landscape in the first three novels in Ali Smith’s season-themed State of the Nation quartet, Autumn (2016), Winter (2017) and Spring (2018). It engages with contemporary ecocritical and feminist conceptualisations of climate change, and debates about the relationship between ecological crisis and the current political landscape to consider the ways in which these subjects are embedded in Smith’s trilogy named for the seasons. It reflects on the potential for the novel form to attempt to bear witness to the present political moment and argues that Smith’s fragmented and polyvocal texts represent an ethical and politically engaged approach to the contemporary crisis, where the novel can seek to enable or rehearse dialogues between groups whose positions are entrenched and at an impasse. It discusses the ways in which the novels dramatise the necessary ways out of seemingly irreconcilable differences through a celebration of empathy, ecological awareness and hospitality,