Privileging the Unseen

The whole ambience in which I was brought up was one in which the unseen is privileged (Mantel 2005)

Hilary Mantel was until recently ‘curiously invisible’ (Vaux 1994) but since winning the Booker Prize in 2009 for her historical novel Wolf Hall she has finally achieved popular recognition and acclaim. However, the tension in her work between visibility and invisibility persists, and her corpus remains neglected within the academy. This symposium aims to redress such disregard whilst also exploring it as a potential consequence of how her writing privileges the unseen – ‘It makes me feel unstable’ said James Runcie in his recent interview Hilary Mantel: A Culture Show Special (2011). The papers will consider uncertainty in Mantel’s fiction and memoir in terms of Gothicism, the medical humanities and deconstruction. This symposium marks an attempt, in the words of Mantel, to gain some ‘purchase’ (Runcie 2011) on what privileging the unseen might actually mean.