March 13, 2014

The Beautiful Author over at FWSA

By Carina Hart

Zadie Smith

(www.inspirational-black-literature.com)

The kind folk over at the FWSA blog (Feminist and Women’s Studies Association) have published my piece on The Beautiful Author here. Whatever would the publishing industry have done without Zadie Smith?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2014 at 4:58 pm and tagged with , , , , , and posted in Capitalism, Feminism, Literature, White and Not White. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

2 responses to “The Beautiful Author over at FWSA”

  • BroadBlogs's avatar BroadBlogs
    March 14th, 2014 at 3:29 am

    Congratulations. Interesting piece.

    It makes me think about women like George Sand being rejected by publishers– before the name changes–because they were women, and how that colored how their work was seen. Luckily, beauty doesn’t have as strong an effect as gender once had. But makes you wonder about how the reader perceives the material, when read through the prism of female beauty.

    Reply
  • Carina Hart's avatar carinaintheory
    March 14th, 2014 at 4:07 pm

    Thanks, and yes, things have certainly changed. But authors are now more visible than they used to be, and when their images get used in marketing you have to wonder about the effect of beauty… There’s an amusing scene in The Vicar of Dibley (this might be a UK only reference) where a book group are discussing Smith’s White Teeth, but none of them have read it and they just talk about how she’s “a lovely girl… yes, wonderful, wonderful writer. Lovely girl.” Poor Zadie!

    Reply

Leave a comment