Reading Hilary Mantel: Haunted Decades

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From the ghosts which reside in Midlands council houses in Every Day is Mothers 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 writers 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.

Reviews

In this timely, comprehensive and smart study of Hilary Mantels oeuvre, Arnold compellingly shows how Mantels work is tied together by intricate situations of haunting in which ghosts of various kinds act as complex literary, political and ethical forces. * Esther Peeren, Professor of Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, co-editor of The Spectralities Reader (Bloomsbury, 2013). *
Arnold writes with striking acuity to offer innovative and exciting readings of Mantels spectral tropes. This compellingly argued and exemplarily researched volume is certain to become a key critical work in the burgeoning field of Mantelian studies. * Ginette Carpenter, co-editor of Hilary Mantel: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, senior lecturer in English, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK *

Author Bio

Lucy Arnold is a Lecturer in Contemporary English Literature at the University of Worcester, UK.