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This chapter explores the writing of Ali Smith from the late 1990s to the publication of How to be Both (2014). It concentrates primarily on her novels and short stories, though some attention is paid to her occasional writings. The chapter is broken into two broad generic sections, the first addressing her short stories together, the second her novels in chronological order. Each text is given close analytical study through formal, stylistic, and thematic critique, building to an overview of an author whose moral sense of duty for the care of the other is paradoxically set against her confusion at the impenetrability of that other’s being.

This essay examines the fortunes in English literature of one of Ariosto’s minor characters, the Spanish princess Fiordispina. It focuses, in particular, on the very different ways in which English authors Sir John Harington and John Gay cope (or fail to cope) with the abundant gender confusion and free-floating sexual desire of the Fiordispina episode in the former’s Orlando Furioso Translated into Heroical Verse (1591) and the latter’s ‘The Story of Fiordispina’ (c. 1720) and Achilles: A play (1732). Framed by Ali Smith’s reflections in Girl Meets Boy (2007) on rewriting old stories for new circumstances, it draws on relevance theory and offers new readings of how Harington and Gay amplify, abridge or alternatively alter the original in accordance with their need to be relevant to the readers for whom they write.

This chapter focuses on the topic of witches in contemporary fantastic writings of Scottish women. It analyses Ellen Galford's Queendom Come, Alice Thompson's Pandora's Box and Ali Smith's The Accidental. The chapter suggests that the witch in these works is a simultaneous embodiment of female marginalisation and feminist subversion, and that the dangerous woman characters challenge binary oppositions between gender and the established hierarchical order.

This chapter considers the revenant motif in fantastic writings of Scottish women. It explains that this motif serves as the paradoxical site of theoretical discourses about corporeality and ethereality, life and death, and seen and unseen. The chapter offers an interpretation of Elspeth Barker's O Caledonia, A.L. Kennedy's So I Am Glad and Ali Smith's Hotel World, suggesting that the ghost in twentieth-century writings signifies the overcoming of structuralist dualism.

This chapter considers the benefits of filtering medieval ideas of unnatural sex through the postmodern category transgender. It begins by engaging with conceptions of transgender time in recent historiography. This is followed by a detailed analysis of passages on cross-gendered performance and illicit sex in Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias, which demonstrate the inextricability of concepts of gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages. The remainder of the chapter focuses on the Ovidian myth of Iphis and Ianthe, a sex change narrative mediated in the Middle Ages via a number of moralized retellings of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. These retellings, which include a translation of the prose Ovide moralisé by William Caxton, variously confront and suppress the Iphis story’s “lesbian” implications. In conclusion, the chapter explores other, alternative responses to the myth of Iphis and Ianthe, including retellings by the fifteenth-century poet and intellectual Christine de Pizan and by the contemporary British novelist Ali Smith.

This chapter considers Ali Smith's The Accidental and Ian McEwan's Saturday. These novels serve as interesting examples in which the problems of knowledge, fictional knowledge of internal time-consciousness and critical knowledge of this fictional knowledge, interact with each other. The Accidental and Saturday seem to link a certain preoccupation of time with the spirit of the times, and they both deal with the intrusion into the life of a family of an outsider. Saturday differs from The Accidental in the sense that the former maintains an entirely implicit self-knowledge in its dramatisation of reflections upon literature, whereas the latter develops its self-knowledge in an explicit way, principally through its anti-realistic frame-breaking.