Reading Hilary Mantel: Haunted Decades

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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 Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Critical interventions Key thinkers A host of ghosts: mapping Mantel’s haunted canon Chapter 1: Not Giving up the Ghost: Preserving the spectral in Mantel’s memoir A ghost, writing: the spectral speaker ‘Show your workings’: identity and intertextuality Intertextuality in ‘King Billy is a gentleman’ The secret garden: cultivating enigma ‘I am disconnecting from my body’: precarious embodiment and sensory haunting ‘Other lives you might have led’: memoir as ghost story Chapter 2: Spectres of Margaret: Thatcherism, care-giving and the gothic in Every Day is Mother’s Day and Vacant Possession Haunted Houses, Monstrous Mothers and the Scene of Domestic Care-Giving Housing and Care-Giving in Thatcher’s Britain ‘The spectre of ambivalence’31: haunting and mothering An unhappy medium: The séance as care-giving situation Seeking Whom They May Devour: Feeding and Eating in Every Day is Mother’s Day Muriel Axon: a ghost carrying a ghost Ghosts from the nursery: abuse, trauma and haunting ‘This homely home-from-home’: Medical Care-Giving Homing Instinct: Community Care-Giving in Theory and Practice Social Care – DHSS and the Evil Eye of Welfare Provision Confessions of a Social Worker: Isabel Field as Gothic Heroine Foregone conclusions: subjective disintegration and failures of care Chapter 3: Spooks and holy ghosts: Spectral politics and the politics of spectrality in Eight Months on Ghazzah Street The ladies vanish: Agency, invisibility and the writing of Jacques Rancière Spectral surveillance and the Gaze: Rancière with Lacan Political poltergeists ‘Who knows what’s under the veil?’: Quasi-gothic and cultural blindness Lost in translation: turning the screw of ethnocentrism Conclusion Chapter 4: The princess and the palimpsest: Skin, screen and spectre in Beyond Black Mediums and media Forgetting the dead: ancestral amnesia and prosthetic memory ‘Rejects, or anomalies’: social death and thingly life Flesh wounds and flash backs: scars as spectral inscription This spectred isle: spectrality as intertextuality Chapter 5: ‘If the dead need translators’: Heresy, haunting and intertextuality in Wolf Hall ‘To Rafe Sadler his books’: inheritance, technology and textuality In the body of the text: corpses, corpora and the Bible in the age of mechanical reproduction Pressing matters: technology, textuality and ghosts from the machine Paratextual activity: textiles, (inter)textuality and haunting Après moi, le deluge: Wolf Hall as the great Fludd ‘I have come to transform you’: Fludd and its intertexts Conclusion Afterword Notes Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Afterword Bibliography Primary sources Secondary sources Index