Covidian Metamorphoses: Art and the Poetics of Transformation in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet

Abstract Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016), coined “the first Brexit novel”, relied on a very “time-sensitive” publication schedule: weeks after the manuscript had been submitted, the book was already published, documenting almost in real-time the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. The remaining three volumes of the Seasonal Quartet (Winter, 2017; Spring, 2019; Summer, 2020) also followed a similarly tight schedule; hence the last piece of the collection, published in the summer of 2020, could already reflect on yet another crisis: that of the COVID-19 pandemic and the first lockdown in Britain. The Quartet offers art as a vital coping mechanism for such critical times, but the present paper argues that the function of art in the Quartet is even more pervasive than that. The sequence’s entire poetics of transformation is founded on art as a mediatized means of experiencing the world, which is then turned into a rhetoric of transformation. The paper traces the three main motifs of the Quartet: that of the tree, the stone, and the cloud/sky to look at how their art-based transformations create a sense of connectedness in the four novels.