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‘The battle against sameness’: Zadie Smith’s rewriting of E.M. Forster’s liberalism

ABSTRACT The singular picture of English culture presented by E.M. Forster in Howards End (1910) doesn’t hold in the hybridised, economically and racially fragmented world Smith portrays in On Beauty (2005), her self-proclaimed rewriting of the earlier novel. If Forster attempts to imagine an inclusive society, frustrated by the limitations of fixed cultural norms, Smith employs the techniques of metamodernism, defined by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin Van den Akker as a mode ‘characterized by the oscillation between a typically modern commitment and a markedly postmodern detachment’, to raise fundamental questions about the desirability of such a project. Culture is shown to be more accessible in Smith’s fictional world— but less straightforward or valuable as a result.