The Circle and the Cross: Image-Schematic Structure and Moral Narrative in Iris Murdoch's A Word Child and Zadie Smith's NW

Abstract: Guided by an expansive New Formalist redefinition of forms as "all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles" (Levine, Forms 3), this essay asks, how does a spatial pattern organize the novel, what textual elements does it organize, and with what effects? Analyzing the image schemas of the circle and the cross in two novels partly set in the London Underground, Iris Murdoch's A Word Child and Zadie Smith's NW , I show how such schemas map overall narrative patterns so as to produce what Clive Bell calls a "significant form," a structure that signifies as well as organizes.