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"Beneath every history, another history:" History, Memory, and Nation in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies
No full textIn the years since I began this degree, Hilary Mantel has risen from obscurity to ubiquity. The many years she has toiled away as author, reviewer, and journalist have left behind an impressive collection of novels, short stories, countless reviews, sharp-witted critiques on her society, and a memoir. In each piece of her writing, Mantel makes one thing clear: she is a political animal. In Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel uses historical fiction to call for a new perspective not only on the saintly Thomas More as a flawed, tragic hero, but also on Anne Boleyn as a tragic scapegoat, while at the same time laying the foundation for seeing Cromwell’s fall as that of another tragic hero, the victim of a nation that slips back into Medieval attitudes and practices, mirroring Mantel’s critique of her own nation’s similar slip into archaic attitudes and practices.
Because of Mantel’s use of myth in these two novels, I begin with an examination of magic and myth in the British context, relying heavily on the work of Keith Thomas. In order to understand the nature of history and its interaction with historical fiction, I explore how history has evolved from occupying the genre of literature to becoming a social science then, following the arguments of Hayden White, becoming once again a close cousin of literature because of its narrative structure. After establishing the original framework for historical fiction first set out by Georg Lukács, I then go on to explore more recent analyses of historical fiction, including Ann Rigney and Mantel herself. In order to better understand how early Tudor England can be considered a nation, I examine the different approaches—from Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm to Liah Greenfeld and Philip S. Gorski—to what a nation is and the history of how the idea of nation has evolved.
Moving on from the theoretical framework, I focus on the major tragic characters of Mantel’s Cromwell novels: Sir Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, and Thomas Cromwell. Because of Mantel’s frequent use of ekphrasis, I deem it necessary to discuss some of the key portraits featured within the pages of her novels. Distinguishing Anne Boleyn from More and Cromwell is the absence of a verifiable portrait of her image.
My research will contribute to the relatively small amount of critical scholarship— a recent search of MLA International Bibliography (29 Oct. 2014) produces nineteen entries for Mantel but, for example, three hundred and sixty for Ian McEwan—performed on the work of an author clearly, as indicated by her back-to-back Man Booker Prize wins for the novels in this study, receiving critical praise from well-established reviewers
Language games, Alex la Guma's fiction, and the new post-apartheid reality for the South African writer
No full textBibliography: p. 125-12
Self-invention, self-construction, self-reinvention: versions of self in the novels of Virginia Woolf
No full textBibliography: p. 93-94.This thesis describes Virginia Woolf's representation of the self in three novels. In Mrs Dalloway, the self is a continuously-changing entity, confronting through particular memories former selves from the perspective of the present moment and the present self. Therefore the self is made up of a successive series of selves, progressively moving towards the present composite self. Woolf retains this view of the self in To the Lighthouse and The Waves, but alters the way in which she presents self-composition. In To the Lighthouse, the self is rendered as a painting. Woolf reinvents the self in The Waves by minimizing the narrator's voice so that the selfhoods of the six characters emerge entirely from their thought processes. Jacob's Room introduces this study, showing Woolf's initial work towards her fully-constructed vision of selfhood. Between the Acts is considered in the conclusion as a novel emphasizing that the Modernist self is fragmented to the point of disintegration
Watershed Literature: place, belonging, and longing for indigeneity in Paddle-to-the-Sea and "Minisniwapta: Voices of the River"
No full textCet article propose la catégorie de la "littérature de bassin versant" pour décrire certaines œuvres qui puisent leur imagerie et leur principe d'unité dans les mouvements non-humains des eaux. L'article parle de deux œuvres certes fort différentes : "Minisniwapta: Voices of the River", un long poème du poète Jon Whyte, de Banff ; et un livre d'enfants très connu, Paddle-to-the-Sea, de Holling C. Holling (qui est également devenu un film de l'Office National du Film du Canada). Les deux œuvres partagent un certain désir d'indigénéité, qu'elles trouvent dans le mouvement intemporel et cyclique des eaux dans le bassin versant. Elles montrent aussi que, même si ce mouvement non-humain —une fois converti en récit— ne peut pas échapper à l'histoire coloniale, le bassin versant offre une source de structure et d'images qui peut servir aux écrivains d’ascendance européenne qui veulent parler du désir d'intégration avec un lieu
Beckett, Duchamp and Chess: A Crossroads at Arcachon in the Summer of 1940
Full text linkL’artiste Marcel Duchamp et le poète Samuel Beckett ont passé l’été 1940 à Arcachon, à jouer aux échecs. L’Histoire n’a pas laissé de trace de leurs conversations. Les témoignages font seulement état de leur intérêt commun pour un jeu qui a par ailleurs déterminé l'orientation de leurs carrières respectives. Cependant, lorsqu’ils sont retournés à Paris en septembre 1940, leur attitude diamétralement opposée quant à l’occupation allemande porte à croire que certains paradoxes présocratiques n’avaient pas été totalement absents de leurs échanges
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