Reading Hilary Mantel: haunted decades

"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."--

Intro; 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 PossessionHaunted 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

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