The Visible and the Invisible Hilary Mantel

This talk addresses the scarcity of critical material on Hilary Mantel’s writing in the academy. It questions the suitability of the ‘origin’ paradigm within the criticism that is available, which closes off the excess of Mantel’s texts through attempts to ‘unite’ her corpus. The ambiguity of her writing, and its suspicions, suggest Jacques Derrida’s thought as a pertinent means to read the differences in her work differently. The proximity of Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy with Derrida’s thought allows the significance of ellipsis to surface as a liberating catalyst for weaving the implications of Derrida’s thinking through the writing of Mantel. This synthesis constitutes an original combination because Mantel’s writing has not been closely studied, Derrida’s notion of ellipsis has been eclipsed by philosophy, and the combination of these two ‘invisibilities’ is seminal. The talk begins with an exploration of the mythologies I discovered and interrogated during the course of my thesis. It then considers the key points in Mantel’s writing career. In particular taking her from the difficulty and invisibility of 1979 when A Place of Greater Safety, her first novel, was rejected, to winning the Booker prize twice in succession in 2009 and 2012. It thereby traces the story of her shift from invisible to infamous, in terms of her treatment by the mainstream British media as well as her phenomenal post-millennium success.

Changing family models in Spain: the impact of the sociodemographic factors

Abstract During the last few decades, there has been an increasing international recognition of the studies related to the analysis of the family models change, the focus being the determinants of the female employment and the problems related to the work family balance (Lewis, 2001; Petit & Hook, 2005Saraceno, Crompton & Lyonette, 20062008; Pfau-Effinger, 2012). The majority of these studies have been focused on the analysis of the work-family balance problems as well as the effectiveness of the family and gender policies in order to encourage female employment (Korpi et al., 2013). In Spain, special attention has been given to the family policies implemented, the employability of women and on the role of the father in the family (Flaquer et al., 2015; Meil, 2015); however, there has been far less emphasis on the analysis of the family cultural models (González and Jurado, 2012; Crespi and Moreno, 2016). The purpose of this paper is to present some of the first results on the influence of the socio-demographic factors on the expectations and attitudes about the family models. This study offers an analytical reflection upon the foundation of the determinants of the family ambivalence in Spain from the cultural and the institutional dimension. This study shows the Spanish family models of preferences following the Pfau-Effinger (2004) classification of the famiy living arrangements. The reason for this study is twofold; on the one hand, there is confirmed the scarcity of studies that have focused their attention on this objective in Spain; on the other hand, the studies carried out in the international context have confirmed the analytical effectiveness of researching on the attitude and value changes to explain the meaning and trends of the family changes. There is also presented some preliminary results that have been obtained from the multinomial analysis related to the influence of the socio-demographic factors on the family model chosen by the individuals in Spain (father and mother working full time; mother part-time father full-time; mother not at work father full-time; mother and father part-time). 3 The database used has been the International Social Survey Programme: Family and Changing Gender Roles IV- ISSP 2012-. Spain is the only country of South Europe that has participated in the survey. For this reason it has been considered as a representative case study.