Published in 2005,

is Hilary Mantel’s ninth novel. The book was shortlisted for the 2006 Orange Prize for fiction and constitutes Mantel’s most overt engagement with the Gothic and the paranormal to date. Mantel’s self confessed concern with “the mystery that lies beyond the visible world” (2010, 8) forms a thread which can be traced throughout her writing. Mantel’s oeuvre is suffused with haunted houses and spectral incursions, burials, resurrections and post-mortem voices. Such uncanny phenomena are, for the most part, not examined directly, and occupy a peripheral place in her texts. Yet in

these phenomena are far from marginal and partial; here Mantel brings the reader face to face with the spectral, the place which Mantel describes as being…

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Citation: Arnold, Lucy. "Beyond Black". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 July 2014 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=26526, accessed 21 November 2024.]

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