Dr Nicola Parsons is an Associate Investigator (2014 and 2015) and Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on the forms of intimacy and connection fostered by the early eighteenth-century novel. Her first book, Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Palgrave, 2009) , concentrates on texts by Delariver Manley, Daniel Defoe, Richard Steele, Edmund Curll and Jane Barker and shows how gossip modelled an interpretative strategy that shaped readers' participation in both literary culture and in public debates. She is currently completing a book manuscript, entitled Form and Matter in the Early Eighteenth-Century Novel, which focuses on transformations of romance by women novelists including Eliza Haywood, Jane Barker, and Elizabeth Rowe.
Nicola’s project with CHE stems from a larger collaborative research project with Dr Alison Winch (Middlesex University) on the ways that female intimacy was embodied, mediated and imagined in the long eighteenth century.
Contact
nicola.parsons@sydney.edu.au
The University of Sydney Staff Profile
Research
Feeling Influence: Friendship and Patronage in Early Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing
Publications
Books
Nicola Parsons, Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Edited Books
Nicola Parsons and Kate Mitchell, Reading Historical Fiction: The Revenant and Remembered Past, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2013
Book Chapters
Nicola Parsons, ‘Early Fiction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Women's Writing in Britain, 1660–1789, ed Catherine Ingrassia (Cambridge: CUP, 2015), pp. 164–79.
Nicola Parsons, ‘Reading and Remembering History in Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, in Kate Mitchell and Nicola Parsons, eds, Reading Historical Fiction: The Revenant and Remembered Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 119–35.
Nicola Parsons and Kate Mitchell, ‘Reading the Represented Past: History and Fiction from 1700 to the Present’. in Kate Mitchell and Nicola Parsons, eds, Reading Historical Fiction: The Revenant and Remembered Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 1–18.
Nicola Parsons, ‘Inscribing the Carte de Tendre: mapping epistolary intimacy in Queen Anne's court’, in Paul Salzman, ed, Expanding the Canon of Early Modern Womens Writing (Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), pp. 168–80.
Nicola Parsons, ‘Unlocking Court Culture: Delarivier Manley's New Atalantis’, in Lisa O'Connell and Peter Cryle, eds, Libertine Enlightenment: Sex, Liberty and License in the Eighteenth-Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 145–60.