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When the first volume of Ali Smith's seasonal quartet, "Autumn", was published in 2016, Smith recounted in a series of interviews and articles how the idea for the tetralogy had arisen: as she had been so late in handing in the manuscript of her former novel, "How to be both" (2014), her publisher had hardly had any time to go through it. The book was printed within only six weeks of submission. Smith was surprised: "Six weeks! It set me thinking about the time it habitually takes between delivery and publication - usually at least nine months, often more like a year and a half." This gave Smith the idea for what she calls a timesensitive experiment, i. e., a set of novels written very close to their time of publication. She had had a book project about the seasons in mind for some time and decided to implement it as follows: "Now I asked [my publisher] if it'd be possible for us to do these books [the seasonal quartet] as a sort of time-sensitive experiment. Four books, written close to their own publication", that "would be about not just their own times, but the place where time and the novel meet." [...] In this article, I will refer to earlier forms of quick-response writing and publication, in particular to the serial literature of the Victorian age, in order to compare them with Smith's own brand of quick-response literature. I will then analyze the effects of this experiment on Smith's texts in terms of form and content, thereby underscoring the novelty of her literary project.
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