Rebecca is a fully-funded PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow in the department of English Literature (with co-supervision in Scottish Literature) currently in her first year of study. Deploying a critical analysis of the fictional novel, her doctoral work investigates how deindustrialisation informs the literary imaginary in a litany of works published since 1980. In 2020, Rebecca graduated from Newcastle University, where she received a first-class Combined Honours BA in English Literature, History, and Politics. As part of this undergraduate degree, she submitted a dissertation exploring the community effects and responses to the 1980 steelworks closure in Consett, County Durham. Rebecca maintained an interdisciplinary approach to deindustrialisation in her English Literature MLitt, also at Newcastle and awarded a Distinction., where she investigated the cultural legacy of deindustrialisation in the fictional output of North-East England. Broadly, her research interests surround critical and literary theory, deindustrialisation studies, health inequalities and regional inequalities.
Project statement: ‘Class, Health and Region: Narratives of Social Trauma in English and Scottish Regional Fiction since Thatcher’
This doctoral project builds upon my existing work on deindustrialisation in fictional output. Now, having established a solid theoretical framework, I push my analysis outward from a North-East England focus and extend into regions across the border, namely the Scottish central belt. Crucial to my thesis is the premise that deindustrialisation is an ongoing process that continues to harm and restrain regions and communities in the present age, compounded by austerity measures and periods of capitalist crises experienced since. Given the scale and speed of which deindustrialisation occurred in Britain, my research upholds the claims made by many deindustrialisation scholars that it must be regarded as a socially traumatising process. The corpus of this research project includes numerous fictional novels from 1980 up to the present day – for example, James Kelman’s 1994 stream-of-consciousness novel How Late it Was, How Late, to Ely Percy’s more contemporary coming-of-age story Duck Feet (2021). Although the loss of industry may not always be explicitly referenced in my primary texts, my research will show that ‘the half-life of deindustrialisation’, to borrow from Sherry-Lee Linkon, always is – be this through accounts of unemployment, poverty, environmental decline or poor health. Due to this, the fictional novel asserts itself as a key informant to the memorisation of deindustrialisation in the long view. Conducting literary analysis can help us answer many crucial questions about the reduction of heavy industry, such as: what do fictional narratives explain about the experience of deindustrialisation, and do these narratives change depending on time or place of publishing? How do working-class writers from deindustrialised regions use the fictional novel to process any social/individualised traumas the move from industry may have induced? What can the fictional novel tell us of how society chooses to remember deindustrialisation, and what does this reveal about the ‘post-industrial’ present?
