“For I Am Still A Type-Writer Girl—At Another Office”: Metonymic Mobility In Fin De Siècle Fiction

First published under the female pseudonym “Olive Pratt Rayner,” Grant Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl is an important text for literary scholars interested in the cultural agency and futurity of the (new) woman type-writer at the end of the nineteenth-century. Activating questions of gender, technology, ability, industry, and communication, this Resident Members’ Series talk will delve into the work that Mackenzie is currently completing for her master’s thesis in English Language and Literature. Offering a combined study of historical context, biography, and contemporary theory, this talk will close-read Allen’s novel to explore its significance for developing crip methodologies of communication. By reading the interplay between the writer, machine, and text as prosthetic, this talk will question the extent to which historical literatures support contemporary disability justice initiatives, not only towards inclusive representation, but also for re-thinking structures of reading and writing.

Mackenzie Ashcroft (she/her) is an MA candidate in the Department of English Literature and Language at the University of British Columbia. She earned her BA Honours in English, with an embedded certificate in creative writing, from the University of Calgary. Mackenzie’s current research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, examines the place of disabled bodies and voices in Victorian Literature, their relationships to technology, and their representations in contemporary speculative fiction genres.