'To everything there is a season’ : tracing hope across the themes and motifs in Ali Smith's novel quartet

Abstract

This dissertation will attempt to trace hope in the themes and motifs that Ali Smith tackles in her four-piece seasonal novel quartet; a series of four books of which two have been published—and these are the two I will be addressing. To begin with, I intend to explore certain aspects of contemporary fiction to set the scene in which Ali Smith is writing in, after which, I would like to also focus on some of her own personal interests; topics which infiltrate her writing and which stem out of the contemporary condition of the world. Following this, I then intend to dedicate the first chapter to the first novel of the quartet, Autumn, in which I want to explore the idea of perceiving and experiencing life through the notion of seasonality and the idea of looking at time and history cyclically. After this, I will then explore Smith’s interest in the interconnectedness between the past, the present and the future. The second chapter will deal with desensitization as a key theme, and I intend to address this in connection to contemporary matters such as climate change and racism. I will also deal with the importance of looking at the past to make sense of our current present and coming future. I will then end the thesis by looking at the importance of art in this quartet, and discuss its persisting power to alter perception; most significantly with regards to self-empowerment and to the ever-lasting necessity of hope.