Dr Nicola Wilson
Responsibilities
I run Part 3 module, 'Class Matters', and Part 2 module 'The Business of Books'. I co-convene the core Masters module 'Materiality & Textuality' and optional module 'Modern Literary Feminisms'. I am also Part 2 Exams Officer for DEL.
I am on the editorial board of Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, the Raymond Williams Society journal.
I am currently supervising PhD projects on the Mills & Boon archive and libraries and literary censorship in Victorian Britain. I would be delighted to hear from prospective PhD students in any of my areas of research.
Areas of Interest
My research focusses on literature in the modern period. I have broad interests in literary history and print culture and my work is underscored by questions of feminism and class.
My first book, Home in British Working-Class Fiction (Ashgate, 2015), argued for the importance of home and domestic space in framing understandings of social class. It was reviewed in the TLS as an 'ambitious and welcome addition' to the study of working-class writing (March, 2016).
My second book, Books by Mail: The Story of the Book Society, 1929-69 explores the lives and literary tastes of Britain's first set of book club judges: Hugh Walpole, J. B. Priestley, Sylvia Lynd, Cecil Day-Lewis and Edmund Blunden.
I am currently working on three research projects. (i) 'Publishing Class' uses the publishers' archives at UoR to explore the long history of publishing working-class writing and the structural challenges that writers from a working-class background have often faced.
(ii) The Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP) www.modernistarchives.com is a critical digital archive that aims to reanimate the networks of C20 publishing. I am working with colleagues in Special Collections and international partners to make parts of the Hogarth Press archive more widely available and developing new research on 'Women in Publishing' as part of this project.
(iii) Creative non-fiction on the Book Society: Britain's first book-of-the-month club. Books by Mail: The Story of the Book Society, 1929-69 has been funded by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. For more on the project see: https://thebooksocietysite.com/
Since 2011 I have worked to bring the writings of Lancashire mill woman Ethel Carnie Holdsworth back into circulation. This was featured in The Big Issue in the North (June 2016) http://www.bigissuenorth.com/features/2016/07/through-the-mill/
Prior to working at Reading I studied at the Universities of Warwick, Oxford and Durham.
For full details of my research please see: Dr Nicola Wilson Research .
Research groups / Centres
I have specialist interests in using The Archive of British Publishing and Printing in my teaching and research, and have written on publishers' and digital archives, circulating libraries, colonial editions, literary censorship, reading patterns, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press. In 2017 I organised the 27th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf at the UoR to coincide with the centenary of the Hogarth Press. Hear me talking to Mariella Frostrup on BBC Radio 4 about the centenary here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08vxkm5
I am theme lead of DEL's 'Archives & Materialities' research strand and co-convene the 'Archives & Texts' seminar series with colleagues in Modern Languages: http://archivesandtexts.wordpress.com/
Publications
2019
- Wilson, N. (2019) ‘So now tell me what you think!’: Sylvia Lynd's collaborative reading and reviewing - the collaborative work of an interwar middlewoman. Literature & History, 28 (1). pp. 49-65. ISSN 0306-1973 doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0306197319829362
- Carnie Holdsworth, E. and Smalley, R. (2019) General Belinda. The Ethel Carnie Holdsworth Series. Kennedy & Boyd, Edinburgh, pp226. ISBN 9781849211369
2018
- Wilson, N. and Battershill, C., eds. (2018) Virginia Woolf and 'The World of Books'. Woolf Selected Papers. Clemson University Press, Clemson, pp312. ISBN 9781942954569
- Wilson, N. (2018) Middlemen, middlebrow, broadbrow. In: Ferrall, C. and McNeill, D. (eds.) British Literature in Transition, 1920-1940: Futility and Anarchy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 315-330. ISBN 9781316535929
2017
- Wilson, N. (2017) Ethel Carnie Holdsworth: genre, serial fiction, and popular reading patterns. In: Goodridge, J. and Keegan, B. (eds.) A History of British Working Class Literature. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 9781107190405 doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108105392.021
- Battershill, C., Southworth, H., Staveley, A., Widner, M., Willson Gordon, E. and Wilson, N. (2017) Scholarly adventures in the digital humanities: making the Modernist Archives Publishing Project. Palgrave Pivot. Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills. ISBN 9783319472102
2016
- Wilson, N. (2016) Virginia Woolf and the Book Society Limited. In: Vandivere, J. and Hicks, M. (eds.) Virginia Woolf and her female contemporaries. Clemson University Press: Woolf Selected Papers. Liverpool University Press, Liverpool. ISBN 9781942954088
- Wilson, N. (2016) British publishers and colonial editions. In: Wilson, N. (ed.) The Book World: Selling and Distributing British Literature. Library of the Written Word. Brill, The Hague. ISBN 9789004315860
- Wilson, N. (2016) The book world: selling and distributing British literature, 1900-40. Library of the Written Word. Brill, The Hague, pp221. ISBN 9789004315860
- Carnie Holdsworth, E. (2016) Helen of Four Gates. The Ethel Carnie Holdsworth Series. Kennedy & Boyd, Edinburgh, pp215. ISBN 9781849211284
- Wilson, N. (2016) Working class fictions, 1940-73. In: Boxall, P. and Cheyette, B. (eds.) Volume 7: British and Irish Fiction since 1940. The Oxford History of the Novel in English. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 9780198749394
2015
- Wilson, N. (2015) Home in British working-class fiction. Ashgate, Farnham, pp240. ISBN 9781409432418
2014
- Wilson, N. (2014) Boots Book-lovers' Library and the novel: The impact of a circulating library market on twentieth-century fiction. Information and Culture: A Journal of History, 49 (4). pp. 427-449. ISSN 2164-8034 doi: https://doi.org/10.7560/ic49402
- Wilson, N., Willson Gordon, E., Staveley, A., Southworth, H. and Battershill, C. (2014) The Hogarth Press, Digital Humanities, and Collaboration: Introducing the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP). In: Wussow, H. and Gillies, M. A. (eds.) Virginia Woolf and the Common(wealth) Reader. Clemson University Digital Press, Clemson, pp. 223-231. ISBN 9780989082679
- Wilson, N. (2014) Archive fever: the publishers' archive and the history of the novel. In: Parrinder, P., Nash, A. and Wilson, N. (eds.) New Directions in the History of the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, pp. 76-87. ISBN 9781137026972
- Parrinder, P., Nash, A. and Wilson, N. (2014) Introduction. In: Parrinder, P., Nash, A. and Wilson, N. (eds.) New directions in the history of the novel. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 1-14. ISBN 9781137026972
- Parrinder, P., Nash, A. and Wilson, N., eds. (2014) New directions in the history of the novel. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp256. ISBN 9781137026972
2013
- Wilson, N. (2013) Circulating morals, 1900-15. In: Bradshaw, D. and Potter, R. (eds.) Prudes on the Prowl: Literature, Obscenity and Censorship in England, 1850-The Present Day. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 52-70. ISBN 9780199697564
- Carnie, E. (2013) Miss Nobody. The Ethel Carnie Holdsworth Series, 1. Kennedy & Boyd, Kilkerran, pp264. ISBN 9781849211277
2012
- Wilson, N. (2012) Virginia Woolf, Hugh Walpole, the Hogarth Press, and the Book Society. English Literary History, 79 (1). pp. 237-6547. ISSN 1080-6547 doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2012.0008
2011
- Wilson, N., ed. (2011) 'This slavery' by Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. Radical Fictions. Trent Editions, Nottingham, pp260. ISBN 9781842331415
2010
- Wilson, N. (2010) Libraries, censorship and reading patterns. In: Parrinder, P. and Gasiorek, A. (eds.) The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel 1880-1940. The Oxford History of the Novel (Vol 4). Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 36-54. ISBN 9780199559336
- Wilson, N. (2010) Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (1886-1962), ex-mill girl novelist. Women's History Magazine, 63. pp. 27-31. ISSN 1476-6760
2007
- Wilson, N. (2007) 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. pp. 26-42. ISSN 1369-9725
@Nicola_LWilson