Bottling the Imagination: Writing as Metamorphosis in Ali Smith's Girl Meets Boy

Abstract

This article discusses ideas about creativity in the context of a recent work by Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy. It follows Pope in theorising a view of creativity that sees it as re-creation and demonstrates the extent to which the context in which Smith's novel is produced, as well as the acknowledged sources underlying it, helps to shape it as text. In examining the relationship between Smith's source texts and the target text she produces, it seeks to point to her creative capacity in re-imagining and re-working an ancient myth in a contemporary context. It focuses, in particular, on her embedded critique of the debasement and commercial packaging of language in marketing and advertising contexts and of a worldview that would see everything, including the imagination, as a commodity capable of being bottled and sold.