FEATURES OF HILARY MANTEL’S HISTORICAL NOVELS

Abstract

It can be said with all certainty that after the Modernists and the narrative forms they introduced, the historical novel has seriously changed. One of the innovative moments in the genre of historical novel was the role of the author, who no longer claimed the usual omniscience and omnipotence. Although, the author did not cease to have knowledge in which direction the story went (due to the time gap between the time of writing the novel and the time of the events narrated by the writer), he or she did not directly «impose» own vision of the events of the past, though the plot developed «along the rails of history» which was familiar to the reader. Instead of an all-knowing narrator, the narrator appears who is «one of us»; authors of historical novels either come up with the narrator who has a peculiar (individual) view of the past and narrates exclusively «from the perspective» of his «I» like Claudius from R. Graves's novel «I, Claudius» (1934), or, even using a third-person narrative, endows these «he/she» with such personal knowledge of the causes and consequences of events that formed the basis of the narrative that any omniscience is simply impossible to talk about.