Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy in the sense of new historicism and postmodernism

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Tezin Türü: Doktora

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Atatürk Üniversitesi, Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Anabilim Dalı, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2024

Tezin Dili: İngilizce

Öğrenci: AHMET YUSUF AKYÜZ

Danışman: İsmail Avcu

Özet:

This thesis analyzes Hilary Mantel’s internationally acclaimed Wolf Hall Trilogy through the combined approaches of New Historicism and Postmodernism, two theoretical frameworks that question the objectivity of historical discourse and emphasize the interplay of politics, power, and social roles in the interpretation of texts. While New Historicism—pioneered by Stephen Greenblatt—challenges text-centered criticism by underscoring the importance of historical context, postmodernism similarly contends that history consists of multiple narratives that are shaped and constructed rather than objectively recorded. Both theories reject the notion of a singular historical truth, holding that every historian inevitably acts as a storyteller, with subjectivity woven into every account of the past. Building upon these insights, the thesis explores how Mantel blurs the boundaries between fiction and historical documentation, revealing history’s narrative qualities. It discusses the core debates surrounding historiography, metahistory, and historiographic metafiction, and examines the “historicity of text” in three key dimensions—religious, political, and economic—alongside the “textuality of history” embodied by Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More, and Anne Boleyn. Central to this study is an investigation of Greenblatt’s concept of subversion and containment of power, approached here from three angles: the destabilization of social hierarchy, the questioning of patriarchal structures, and the subversion of collective fears that blur the line between the living and the dead. By foregrounding the entanglement of fact and fiction, Mantel’s trilogy exposes how historical narratives are continuously reshaped by power relations, subjective viewpoints, and cultural contexts, ultimately challenging any assumption of a stable, unified Tudor history.