Hilary Mantel

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.

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.

Foreword: Mark Lawson Series 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 Blood Victoria 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