Hilary Mantel: Contemporary Critical Perspectives

by Eileen Pollard (Editor), Jeannette Baxter (Editor), Ginette Carpenter (Editor), Kaye Mitchell (Editor), Peter Childs (Editor)

Overview

The first British writer to win the Booker Prize on two separate occasions - for Wolf Hallin 2009 and its sequel Bring Up the Bodiesin 2012 - Hilary Mantel is one of the most popular and lauded novelists working today.

Hilary Mantel: Contemporary Critical Perspectivesis a critical guide to Mantel's work, from her earliest novels through to her recent Thomas Cromwell fictions, including analysis of her short story collections and memoir. Chapters cover such topics as Mantel's engagement with history to her deployment of the spectral and her extensive intertextuality. The book also includes a comprehensive interview with Mantel herself that explores her work and career.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350154827
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	03/19/2020
Series:	Contemporary Critical Perspectives
Edition description:	Critical
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.39(d)

About the Author

Eileen Pollard is Lecturer in English at the University of Chester, UK. She is co-editor (with Berthold Schoene) of Accelerated Times: British Literature in Transition, 1980-2000.

Ginette Carpenter is Senior Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.

Table of Contents

Foreword ix

Series editors' preface xiii

Acknowledgements xiv

Contributors xv

Hilary Mantel: A Chronology xvii

'What Cannot Be Fixed, Measured, Confined The Mobile Texts of Hilary Mantel Eileen Pollard Ginette Carpenter 1

1 Mantel's Social Work Gothic: Trauma and State Care in Every Day Is Mother's Day and Vacant Possession Eleanor Byrne 13

2 History, Nation and Self: Wolf Hall and the Machinery of Memory Siobhan O'Connor 27

3 Making History Otherwise: Learning to Talk and The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher Eileen Pollard 41

4 Reading Minds - Wolf Hall's Revision of the Poetics of Subjectivity Renate Brosch 57

5 Subjectivity in Process: Writing and the I in Giving Up the Ghost and Ink in the Blood Victoria Bennett 73

6 Becoming Ghost: Spectral Realism in Hilary Mantel's Fiction Wolfgang Funk 87

7 Walking the Dead: Unruly (Re)Animation in A Place of Greater Safety Ginette Carpenter 101

8 Holy Ghost Writers: Spectrality, Intertextuality and Religion in Wolf Hall Fludd Lucy Arnold 117

9 'I Am a Settlement, a Place of Safety, a Bombproof Shelter': Hauntings, Hospitality and Homeland Insecurity in Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black Kathryn Bird 133

'Between the Real and the Imagined': Hilary Mantel's Craft 147

Further Reading 156

Index 159