Abstract: One of the few authors to win the Booker Mann Prize twice, Hilary Mantel has become one of England’s foremost authors. Mantel’s name has been made by her two most recent historical novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, two of a trilogy about the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, a man borne dizzily up by the King’s confidence and then down as the cost of that intimacy. For Cromwell, it does not do to know too much. The question of knowledge— facts promulgated or withheld, ideas traded upon or proscribed, associations owned or denied—is at the heart of Mantel’s evocation of the Royal Court, of Cromwell’s Putney, and of county and country. The question of knowledge similarly haunts Mantel’s earlier historical novels, A Place of Greater Safety and The Giant, O’Brien, where questions posed by Enlightenment social thought and scientific revolution are answered by ever more bloody inquiries into order: whether that is Danton, Robespierre and Desmoulins on their impossible search for true egalitarianism, or the Surgeon John Hunter’s quest for perfect anatomical knowledge. But the question of knowledge—what to know/how to know/ how to impart what’s known—also underpins broader discussions about the role of the historical novel as history, and the techniques of craft in writing historical fiction. I here investigate the question of knowledge in the historical novels of Hilary Mantel, a question played out within and without the texts.
Bio: Sara Knox is the author of Murder: a Tale of Modern American Life (1998) and her ongoing scholarly research is concerned with death, violence and representation. Her most recent non-fiction publications include an essay on death, film and the representation of consciousness 'inMortality 11.3' (2006) and a study of Henry Lee Lucas in Famous American Crimes and Trials (2004). In 2007 her novel The Orphan Gunner was published by Giramondo. Sara Knox supervises on historical fiction, death, violence and representation. Sara teaches in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, UWS and is a member of the Writing & Society Research Centre.
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