Staff Profile:Dr Nicola Wilson

Name:

Dr Nicola Wilson

Job Title:

AHRC Postdoctoral Research Assistant

Responsibilities:

I am working on a two year research project with Professor Patrick Parrinder and Dr Andrew Nash looking at the impact of changing distribution and reading patterns on the novel in Britain from 1880 to 1940. In particular we are looking at the impact of new public libraries, cheap subscription libraries and new retail outlets selling novels during this period, as well as the sense of a wider 'Reading Public', and asking how these things might have affected the form and content – the writing – of the novel, or not. The project is also looking at the possible censoring influence of these new patterns of distribution and the perceived stratification of fiction into different forms – highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow – supposedly catering for the different tastes of the new reading market. A lot of this research is using the many Publishers Archives held in the Special Collections at Reading.

Areas of Interest:

I am interested in the history of the novel and histories of reading as well as the workings of class and gender in late nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and cultural history.

My PhD thesis, which I am revising for book form, looks at the representation of the home and domesticity in novels by British working-class writers, asking how ideas about 'home' – both as a material and as an imagined space – impact upon the writing of 'class'. I am particularly interested in interdisciplinary work on the novel.

Research groups / Centres:

Publications:

I am currently working on a critical edition of Ethel Carnie Holdsworth's This Slavery, which was first published by the Labour Publishing Company in 1925.

Carnie Holdsworth worked full-time in the Lancashire cotton industry until her early 20s, and was a prolific author, journalist and poet. This Slavery reworks the popular 'mill-girl' fiction of the time – the rags-to-riches stories produced in cheap weekly magazines for working women and girls – through the lens of a socialist and feminist consciousness. The novel is a key intervention in socialist feminist debate in the interwar period as well as a very rare example in the history of women's writing of a published novel written by a female working-class author.

Other publications are:

'Politicising the Home in Ethel Carnie Holdsworth's This Slavery (1925) and Ellen Wilkinson's Clash (1929)', Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, 5 (2007-8), 26-42

'Reproducing the Home in Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers', Home Cultures, 2:3 (2005), 299-314