Depicting the events initiated by a stranger's arrival to a rural Catholic parish in 1950s England, Hilary Mantel's (1989) novel Fludd is built upon fundamentally metaphoric foundations. Most ...noticeably, the novel's articulation of alchemy captures the defining opposition of literal and fantastical meaning at the heart of alchemical symbols. It does so via a metaphorical construction that is first outlined in the opening paratextual "note" and which provides the novel's narrative backbone. This article adopts a broadly cognitive approach to illustrate how metaphor fulfils multiple functions in the text, acting as a tool of characterisation, a means of narrative compression and a form of meta-textual referencing, all of which link to the novel's central theme of transformation, particularly in the context of contemporary Catholicism. In so doing, it draws upon Biebuyck and Martens' concept of the "paranarrative" to demonstrate metaphor's potential to fulfil a range of fundamental narrative functions.
Storytelling is good for us-or so we are told. This article examines two memoirs, by Hilary Mantel and Susanna Kaysen, in which narrating experiences of gynecological pain provokes shame and deepens ...pain. By attending to shame as a textual presence, I intervene in a longstanding debate about how to make sense of pain and illness. Shame, I argue, reveals the presence of multiple (and often contrasting) illness narratives; I analyze these narratives, and their interplay, across Mantel's and Kaysen's memoirs. As scholarship moves beyond, past, or post-narrative, I urge us to stay: to interrogate the ways in which illness narratives interact-amplifying some stories and storytellers whilst fragmenting or silencing others-and to examine the responsibility we all have within this collective sense-making.
Drawing on Hilary Mantel's evocation of the frozen body of the monarch as an object to be gazed upon and consumed, this article revisits three cinematic Shakespearean films in order to demonstrate ...the ways in which kings are made abject. By applying Laura Mulvey's language of scopophilia to instances in Ran (Kurosawa, 1985), King Lear (Brook, 1971), and Macbeth (Kurzel, 2015) where kings are framed as still, this article sees royal bodies at the mercy of the camera. In their stillness and fragmentation, especially at moments of trauma, these bodies both draw the gaze of the camera while at the same time being subject to exploitation by it. Further, by applying an ecocritical framework, this article argues that these bodies are consumed both by and along with the landscape as well as the camera, aligning the fate of the abject king with the fate of the land they inhabit, if not rule. Through reframing the relationship between Shakespearean screen monarchs, the filmed environment, and the camera as one of hungry scrutiny, the article concludes that the power relationships of Shakespearean tragedy are open to subversion.
With the publication of Hilary Mantels latest novel, The Mirror and the Light, in March 2020, the incredibly successful Wolf Hall trilogy came to an end. And so does the career of the main character ...of Mantels narrative, the "lowborn" from Putney, who eventually becomes the Earl of Essex under Henry VIII-a fantastically inconceivable trajectory of upward mobility in Tudor England. The aim of the present article is to attempt to demonstrate that the main character of the trilogy, Thomas Cromwell, as he is portrayed by Hilary Mantel and not taking into account the real historical character, represents a sort of Tudor prototype of the social upstart, similar to the "keen types" of the 1950s portrayed by authors as John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, or Keith Waterhouse. While I do not claim these two "types" are identical, I do suggest that Mantels Cromwell exhibits certain features that would make him at least similar to the 1950s hero, with one striking common feature: their feeling of alienation resulting from their failed attempt at embourgeoisement and their painful awareness of class. Their "class consciousness" is not to be understood in the strict Lukacsian sense; Cromwell and the "keen types" of the 1950s are to be seen as characters possessing a set of values, beliefs, and scruples with regard to their "belonging" to a recognizable social class, their interests, their socio-economic rank in society as a whole, and a certain feeling of "allegiance" to that specific social class.
The introduction to this special issue details each of the articles and situates the themes covered not only in relation to existing scholarship on the royal body, but to examples of the depiction of ...current British royalty in the media. We reflect, for instance, on the complex ideological constructions at work in the British press's depiction of Catherine Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge in comparison to Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, and contrast the two royal women in order to highlight the distinctly racialized and gendered ways in which royal bodies are seen to occupy public space. In introducing the interdisciplinary approaches taken across the special issue and the depth and variety of discussion, we set out the importance of attending to the performativity of power and its multiply mediated and multiply constituted sites.
Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy are iconic pieces of literature, but also represent a hugely insightful commentary on the law. Her protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, is the archetype of a philosophical ...legal pragmatist: willing to use the law and its language to achieve his ends, but regarding adherence to any principled or abstract account of the law as misleading and even dangerous. With striking parallels to the pragmatist philosophy of William James, Richard Rorty, Richard Posner and others, Mantel's Cromwell illustrates both the promise of legal pragmatism-its ability to get results without false compunction about means-but also its dangers: that one may pick the wrong prince, or make flawed or base calculations on how to act. The Wolf Hall trilogy shows this in a manner far more clear and far more vivid than any purely philosophical accounts, and capture something deep about the theory and practice of law. As such, their commentary on the law, authority and governance deserves our close attention.
This paper offers a reading of Hilary Mantel's memoir, Giving Up The Ghost (2003). The interest of the memoir derives from the fact that it provides an exceptionally rich picture of the impact of ...family life on a child's attitudes towards her own body. Mantel presents her bodily experiences as primitive, often unconscious, perceptions of the relationships within her family of origin. When she discovers new things about those relationships, she must register the change through her body in some way. Drawing on a range of concepts taken from psychoanalytic psychosomatics, I suggest that at the heart of the memoir is the author's bafflement at the repeated and uncanny irruption of a conflict between her body as a somewhat autonomous signifying entity and the psychological strength she seeks and often finds through identifications with family members. I argue that this conflict overlapped with her acceptance of a female gender identity. The sustained nature of this conflict prevented her from establishing a metric of what I will call 'psychosomatic normality', with disastrous consequences when she began to suffer the symptoms of acute endometriosis. The memoir also shows the power of early life in determining how diseases are experienced subjectively, over time.
This article analyses Hilary Mantel’s critically-acclaimed Tudor novel series (Wolf Hall, 2009; Bring Up the Bodies, 2012; The Mirror & the Light, 2020) in the context of Brexit. Even though Mantel ...has dismissed any possible analogy between the Reformation and Brexit, this research builds on the hypothesis that the past and the present interact in historical fiction, a genre that has contributed to both feeding and questioning the myths upon which nations are constructed. More specifically, I focus on the trilogy’s protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, to argue that he is presented as the architect of what Whig historiography has understood as the pillars of Englishness (and, by extension, Britishness), often evoked in the discursive context surrounding Brexit. However, although the narrative’s portrayal of Cromwell undoubtedly fosters the reader’s sympathy with the character, a deeper analysis of Mantel’s characterisation and narrative techniques —and, more specifically, Cromwell’s status as a flawed human being presented through the lens of what turns out to be an unreliable narrator— suggests that Mantel’s portrayal of Cromwell cannot be reduced to a simple vindication of the Whiggish notion of Englishness, subtly questioning instead the myths upon which the latter is built.
The present article develops a feminist approach to cognitive narratology on the basis of recent work in embodied cognition. Cognitive narratology does not traditionally consider gender perspectives, ...for a variety of reasons, none the least because the gendering of brains into 'male' and 'female' is deeply problematic. Contemporary cognitive narratology moves its point of interest however from the brain to the larger connections between brain, body and their situatedness in the world. From this new, embodied approach to cognition, we work toward a feminist dimension for cognitive narratology, drawing on issues of performativity, habitus and interpellation and highlighting the degree to which the notion of embodiment brings together both cognitive and cultural aspects of narrative. On the example of Hilary Mantel's short story 'The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher' (2014), we outline the complex ways in which narration, body images/body schemata, and metaphors interact and how these interactions can be analysed by an embodied feminist narratology that takes seriously both the embodied engagements of reading narrative and the edge within it that literature reveals.
This article maps the complex interactions between the political and the spectral in Hilary Mantel's critically neglected novel Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, charting the complex and sometimes ...paradoxical relationships between agency, invisibility, spectrality, and power that are present in this text. By mobilizing the work of Jacques Rancière alongside the thinking of Jacques Lacan, this article establishes Eight Months on Ghazzah Street as a text driven by the need to articulate the politically charged nature of the liminal space wherein individuals and events can be rendered spectral.
!["[E]verything that is to be...](http://api.summon.serialssolutions.com/2.0.0/image/issn/XR4PS5YY4K/0013-838X/small "\"[E]verything that is to be Made Whole Must First be Broken\": Religion, Metaphor and Narrative Alchemy in Hilary Mantel's Fludd (1989)")
PDF
