Uploaded May 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago

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Hello! In this video I'm going to talk about On Beauty by Zadie Smith and Howards End by E M Forster. It's not often I do a book review on this channel, but I fell in love with Zadie Smith's On Beauty this year and wanted space to talk about it and one of my favourite literary devices: intertextuality. In this video I explore how Zadie Smith uses an homage to E M Forster to open up some of the themes in the Edwardian novel, create dramatic irony, and shine a mirror onto her own society.

Sources

Smith's Essays on Forster
theguardian.com/books/2003/nov/01/classics.zadiesmith
nybooks.com/articles/2008/08/14/em-forster-middle-manager

Other
theguardian.com/books/2005/sep/10/fiction.zadiesmith
theguardian.com/books/2005/sep/04/fiction.zadiesmith
theguardian.com/books/2006/jul/08/fiction.zadiesmith
journals.openedition.org/ces/8384