Study Of The Marginalized People In Wolf Hall From The Perspective Of New Historicism

Hilary Mantel（July 6,1952）is a two-time winner of the Booker Prize for her best-selling novels,Wolf Hall（2009）and its sequel,Bring Up the Bodies（2012）,and until now she is the only female writer in history that won this prize two times.Wolf Hall is a historical novel that tells the story about Thomas Cromwell’s journey from the son of a blacksmith to one of the most trusted and closest officials of King Henry VIII.The plot of this novel mainly develops with King Henry VIII’s divorce case,which echoes the authentic historical background.Mantel not only unfolds a brutal social reality in Tudor Dynasty,but also unlocks one of the most mysterious eras of British history.In Wolf Hall,Hilary Mantel not only describes the king’s desperation for a male heir,Tudor’s break with the Roman Catholic church,power struggle in the palace,but also the cry from the marginalized people,through whose struggle and rebellion,readers can have a clearer picture of the 16^th century Tudor Dynasty.For it was a historical novel,it surprised many when it won the Booker Prize.Since then,the novel has received wide attention from readers home and abroad.The existing studies on Wolf Hall are mainly about the reshaping of Tudor history and the re-imaging of the protagonist Thomas Cromwell.Based on the existing studies,this thesis applies New Historicism theory and Michel Foucault’s concept of power and discourse to analyze the marginalized people living in Tudor Dynasty.Michel Foucault is one of the most important representatives of New Historicism.Foucault’s concept of power and his analysis of the role of the author in texts have a great influence on the theory of New Historicism.For Foucault,authors are constructed by the institutions that determine discourse.Chapter II makes an analysis of how Mantel created the historical events and historical figures in Tudor Dynasty from the perspective of“Historicity of Texts.New Historicism attempts to champion the marginalized,the poor,the coloured and the women.Chapter III analyzes the fate and the living situation of the marginalized people from the perspective of“Textuality of History”.Chapter IV makes a further study of the living situation of the marginalized people with Foucault’s concepts of power and discourse,and it comes to the conclusion that the marginalized people living in Tudor Dynasty did not have the right to voice for themselves.Hopefully,the readers will have a deeper understanding of this novel.