Wednesday, February 20, 2013

In case you wondered …

 Hilary Mantel: why novelists are deliberately misunderstood | Books | guardian.co.uk. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


Mantel was attacking the paper doll in which newspapers have imprisoned the real Kate Middleton. That can't be acknowledged without admitting the idea that there's a gap between this paper doll and the real person – that the Kate of your own front page is a brutal and sentimental fiction maintained for ease and profit. The point of Mantel's piece was necessarily invisible to parsing in a Daily Mail news story. So a story had to be made – because here was a famous writer writing about a subject of intense interest to the paper – by missing the point.

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