Cromwell on the World Stage: Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and the Historical Novel After Globalization

Abstract:Critics have argued that the historical novel today, in the era of globalization, has become outmoded, too nationalist, or simply too burdened by mere decoration of the past. Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (2008), however, embraces the pageantry of Tudor England to interpolate its readers into a collective project of refiguring national history, and the form of the nation itself, as an international process from its inception. The novel's protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, marshals his considerable pan-European bureaucratic power to forge a coherent English nation-state. In rewriting English historiography around such an international practice, Wolf Hall reinvigorates the contemporary historical novel by dismissing claims that national history and globalized perspectives are in tension. Rather, thinking both nationally and globally simultaneously is not only possible, but the only way to understand national history in the first place.