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List of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1 Not Giving up the Ghost: Preserving the spectral Mantel’s Memoir
Chapter 2 Spectres of Margaret: Thatcherism, Care-giving and the Gothic in Every Day is Mother’s Day (1985) and Vacant Possession (1986)
Chapter 3 Spooks and Holy Ghosts: Spectral Politics and the Politics of Spectrality in Eight Months on Ghazzah Street
Chapter 4 The Princess and the Palimpsest: Skin, Screen and Spectre in Beyond Black
Chapter 5 ‘If the Dead Need Translators’: Heresy, Haunting and Intertextuality in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies
Afterword
Bibliography
About the author
Lucy Arnold is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Worcester, UK.
Summary
From the ghosts which reside in Midlands council houses in Every Day is Mother’s Day to the resurrected historical dead of the Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, the writings of Hilary Mantel are often haunted by supernatural figures. One of the first book-length studies of the writer’s work, Reading Hilary Mantel explores the importance of ghosts in the full range of her fiction and non-fiction writing and their political, social and ethical resonances. Combining material from original interviews with the author herself with psychoanalytic, historicist and deconstructivist critical perspectives, Reading Hilary Mantel is a landmark study of this important and popular contemporary novelist.
Foreword
One of the first full-length studies of the work of the Booker Prize-winning writer of Wolf Hall explores the significance of ghosts in Manel's writings.
Additional text
Arnold writes with striking acuity to offer innovative and exciting readings of Mantel’s spectral tropes. This compellingly argued and exemplarily researched volume is certain to become a key critical work in the burgeoning field of Mantelian studies.
