Read more
The first British writer to win the Booker Prize on two separate occasions - for Wolf Hall in 2009 and its sequel Bring Up the Bodies in 2012 - Hilary Mantel is one of the most popular and lauded novelists working today. Hilary Mantel: Contemporary Critical Perspectives is 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.>
List of contents
Foreword:
Mark LawsonSeries editors' preface
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Hilary Mantel: A chronology
Introduction: 'What cannot be fixed, measured, confined': The mobile texts of Hilary Mantel
Eileen Pollard (University of Chester, UK) and Ginette Carpenter (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK) 1. Mantel's Social Work Gothic: Trauma and State Care in
Every Day is Mother's Day and
Vacant Possession Eleanor Byrne (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK) 2. History, Nation and Self:
Wolf Hall and the Machinery of Memory
Siobhan O'Connor (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
3. Making History Otherwise:
Learning to Talk and
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher Eileen Pollard (University of Chester, UK) 4. Reading Minds:
Wolf Hall's Revision of the Poetics of Subjectivity
Renate Brosch (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
5. Subjectivity in Process: Writing and the 'I' in
Giving Up the Ghost and
Ink In The BloodVictoria Bennett (University of Kent, UK)6. Becoming Ghost: Spectral Realism in Hilary Mantel's Fiction
Wolfgang Funk (University of Mainz, Germany)
7. Walking the Dead: Unruly (Re)Animation in
A Place of Greater Safety Ginette Carpenter (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
8. Holy Ghost Writers: Spectrality, Intertextuality and Religion in
Wolf Hall and
Fludd Lucy Arnold (University of Leeds, UK)
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 (Edge Hill University, UK) Interview
Further Reading
Index
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.