Stijn Vervaet
Literature makes you feel, and it can get you thinking too. But how do you move from signs on the page to thoughts and feelings? And why does fiction sometimes feel more real than the world around us? My name is Stijn Vervaet, and together with my colleagues from the Literature, Cognition and Emotions project, LCE for short, we will discuss these and other questions in the coming weeks. Today's guest is Yasemin Nurcan Hacıoğlu, a PhD student at University of Oslo, who has just submitted her dissertation titled “Thinking through poems", and our topic today is the interrelation between fictional characters composing poems, emotions, and female agency in late 18th century novels. Thank you for joining us. Yasmin.
Yasemin Nurcan Hacıoğlu
Thank you for having me.
Stijn Vervaet
I'd like to start by mentioning that you work on late 18th, early 19th century literature. This brings us, of course, to the emergence of the Gothic, primarily in English, but you also have an interest in Russian literature to which we will come back later. You've just completed and submitted your PhD dissertation, titled "Thinking through poems. Composition and decision making and late 18th century women's novels". Congratulations.
Yasemin Nurcan Hacıoğlu
Thank you.
Stijn Vervaet
In your dissertation, you focus more specifically on female agency and how female characters' practices of composing poems in late 18th, early 19th century novels help them make decisions. Could you for a start tell us something more about the novel sent authors who have studied? Are these canonical or also lesser known ones? Why are these so well suited to study the questions you were interested in? What was their status at the time of publication? And now? And how are they usually perceived in scholarship?
Yasemin Nurcan Hacıoğlu
Yeah, so I cover a couple of authors starting with Ann Radcliffe, who is now sort of seen as a canonical author of the Gothic form. And then I move into authors, female authors, who are seen as sort of reproducing, in a sort of trashy popular culture way, the work that and Radcliffe does. So that's the kind of – how it's been traditionally seen, like these imitators – like Eleanor Sleath, and Charlotte Dacre. But what I'm really interested in is building on feminist criticism that has, kind of, given this literature political meaning, or uncovered the political meaning that was in that literature, for example, in Ann Radcliffe's novels, and a lot of gothic fiction, women's gothic fiction at the time, you have heroines who are sort of trapped in castles in what we would now call abusive situations. And feminist criticism has revealed how these sort of fantastical situations are actually in very direct discourse with the political situation for women at the time.
Stijn Vervaet
But in your dissertation, you also focus on the practice of composing. So could you tell us something more about the poems that figure in this novel? So why is it so important or interesting that we look into these poems? Or haven't they attracted scholarly attention before?
Yasemin Nurcan Hacıoğlu
Yeah, so a sort of traditional reading has been that: Into the emerging form of the novel, which is sort of becoming a huge thing in the 18th century, some authors would insert the more traditional form of the poem to add cultural prestige into this growing form. And I suppose my work complicates that – I have to pay credit to some fantastic scholars who have complicated what the poem in the novel means in this time period. And that includes the feminist work of Ingrid Horrocks, who wrote a wonderful book recently called Women Wanderers, which looks at fragments of poems in these gothic novels, to suggest how these fragments show that the heroine's thinking is fragmented, because her time is not her own. So this is sort of linking psychology or sort of a type of focus on the heroine's thoughts with the patriarchal situation she is in. And with my focus on cognitive perspectives and composition, what I'm looking at more is how characters actually construct these poems themselves. So rather than characters not necessarily being in control of the poems, I focus on poems that the novel actually represents female characters as very carefully constructing at length, and I look at how, basically, that shows how characters can construct their own fictions and their own thinking using this sort of powerful form of literature.
Stijn Vervaet
So now you have mentioned that these characters are constructing their own compositions or poems within these novels. So this could perhaps bring us to the topic of decision making and female agency, which is crucial in your in your dissertation. But didn't the late 18th century novel emerge with the backdrop of the English reception of the French Revolution in an era of distrust of any radical, political and feminist thought, as you also note in your dissertation, so how can we understand an female agency at the backdrop of very conservative, rather fixed notions of female morality going hand in glove with, for example, the tale of the fallen woman?
Yasemin Nurcan Hacıoğlu
Yeah, so I suppose the contribution I hope to make is... As well as these fictions, very powerfully revealing patriarchal abuses. And this was, of course, a time in British culture, following the French Revolution, when there was a lot of radical thinking, but there was also huge backlash to radicalism, as well as these gothic novels revealing patriarchal abuses, I also want to look at how the model... how you can literally navigate your way through these situations. So rather than the poems sort of being added in later, as an "oh, the figure of the author has added something to explain the situation in retrospect", I'm taking a different perspective that these writings, that are sort of inserted in – very self consciously inserted in – as having been constructed in response to the immediate dilemma in the plot, they kind of show how with the tool of writing, you can then construct... construct a fiction or a working idea that the characters couldn't crucially do without having these tools.
Stijn Vervaet
Theoretically, you start from two interrelated strengths: On the one hand, distributed cognition, and on the other hand, predictive processing. So could you briefly say something about how we should understand these notions? Where do they come from? And, not in the least, why are they so useful to discuss composition on the one hand, and plot and emotions on the other hand?
Yasemin Nurcan Hacıoğlu
Yeah, so distributed cognition are used through philosophy of mind. And basically, it looks at how the objects that we use in everyday life enable and are actually part of our cognition, and a good example of this is like diaries or the notes we take, or maps, where aspects of our thinking, like memory, are enabled, and absolutely sort of part of this object. So it's about thinking about not just cognition as just your brain, but actually cognition as all the objects that we use around us. And this is particularly great for thinking about cultural objects and arts objects, because there's, there's such a richness to what... what processes they enable.
Stijn Vervaet
So literature would also be one of those cultural objects in this respect.
Yasemin Nurcan Hacıoğlu
Yeah, yeah. And, and painting and, and all that sort of smaller forms within this, like poetry and novels, all these cognitive processes, we can really go into to see what specifically they allow us to do. And with predictive processing, the sort of really interesting aspect about it is, it looks at aspects of our cognition that we sort of more traditionally think about as being beyond our control and nothing to do with agency, like memory and emotions. And it says that actually, these responses are culturally learned. And not only do we culturally learn things like emotions, these... these aspects, such as our emotions, we actually often unconsciously choose them, because we've also culturally learnt what is... what choosing that emotion is going to change about future events. So it's a very different way of thinking about, for example, if we apply it to... when it's applied to literature, if a character, such as a sort of female character in a sentimental novel, or in a gothic novel, that has all these extreme emotions, it's such a great way of revising how we perceive that as being like the total opposite of agency, to thinking about, wait, if this character is responding this way, what social and cultural response will this have later in the novel, and is it actually a form of agency?
Stijn Vervaet
Now that you mentioned agency, maybe we could discuss a bit more in detail, the practices of composition, and how could your theoretical approach, from related to a distributed cognition, actually shed new light on the female heroines' composition practices in the novels you have looked at? So, you note in your dissertation, for example, that the late 18th early century, early 19th century saw a tension between two dominant notions of composition. On the one hand, we have these neoclassical theories providing a set of rules for composing a poem, or, very often some of those rules were modeled after composition rules for... for painting, painting landscapes and so on. But on the other hand, we have emerging romantic ideas about originality. So perhaps we could take one of the better known examples you discuss, Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, to illustrate or discuss the question of composition – and related to theories of distributed cognition and extended mind?
Yasemin Nurcan Hacıoğlu
Yeah. So, The Mysteries of Udolpho is a very long novel and gothic criticism has often focused on a fairly small section of the novel, when the heroine is actually sort of trapped in a very cliché Gothic castle. But a much larger part of the novel is extremely long landscape descriptions. And I suppose the question is, what, what do we do with them? I am building on fantastic work by scholars such as Jane Stabler, who have looked at how the landscapes and poems in the novel represent forms such as pictorial poesis, which is like painting like poetry, as in the poems and paintings already have some hints that they've sort of been painted or constructed. But what I build on that with cognitive approaches, is focusing in much more on how the poem and the landscapes are shown to be constructed. And specifically, how this allows the heroine to imagine things that she couldn't imagine without using these sort of mental tools of, okay, I'm going to add, I'm going to visualize and imagine adding a line there in this landscape I'm imagining, I'm going to add a dolphin into this painting or into this poem, we're going to add a camel there, and this is going to completely change the poem I'm imagining. So what these poems in the novel do, and I think they're kind of overlooked, because sometimes they're quite kind of funny and, and ridiculous, like a character's sort of imagining these seemingly nonsensical, imagined narratives – but what these novels really foreground is how using these instructions from neoclassical painting and poetry, enables her to form these very specific, rather surprising poetic narratives.
Stijn Vervaet
So these poems are actually not just a kind of echo chamber of characters' thoughts, but they... they move the plot forward, or they play a more constitutive role in the novel.
Yasemin Nurcan Hacıoğlu
Yeah. So I suppose, one... one example could be a character... that the heroine in the novel is often – Emily – is often seen as the prototypical heroine without agency. She's over-emotional, she faints a lot. She has been read by some critics as having imaginations that are fantastical to the point that they are delusional. But if we look closely at the poems and what she actually constructs, we can see that some of these emotions are actually constructed through her use of painting and poetry and cultural forms. For example, there's a... one thing I've... one example I focus on in my thesis, is that the villain of the novel, Montoni, who I think, through feminist criticism, we can safely say would now be called a sort of abusive patriarchal figure, keeps encouraging her to marry against her will and then tries to force her to marry against her will and in her... in some of her imaginative thinking and poetry, she construct him into being an incredibly monstrous stereotypical visual figure. And I think this, this construction is important because it it strongly revises this view that these are just, you know, the hysterical lack of agency responses of a female character. Instead, we can see that it's an example of a character constructing a very vivid visual image that allows her to, to refuse... allows her in her cognition to refuse and to justify her responses to this character.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, you've mentioned that Emily was the main character of The Mysteries of Udolpho... As is often reacting over emotionally, she's fainting a lot. So, perhaps we could discuss emotions and characters' decision making a bit more. So in your discussion of the poems and their function in the novel, these emotions play often a decisive role, and an important reference in your understanding or interpreting of characters' emotions is the work of the psychologists and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, who has put forward the theory of "constructed emotions" as we touched upon also earlier in our conversation. So could you tell us something more about her concept and why it was particularly helpful for developing your argument and the new reading of these novels?
Yasemin Nurcan Hacıoğlu
When we see a female character who is responding with a very strong, emotive response, we, we've sort of almost... almost been trained to see this as the complete opposite of agency. But what Feldman Barrett conceptualizes, within psychology, is that emotions are constructed, they are something we learn. We learn to take our feelings and responses and culturally learn how to categorize them under certain words, and what's interesting about Feldman Barrett is that she put such an emphasis on the importance of language to categorize our emotions. And once we think about this, within the frame of the novel, we... we can also add the idea of narratives, but we can also add, I suppose, from distributed cognition, the tool that someone with a pen in their hand has to be able to write in the emotion that they have, as well.
Stijn Vervaet
So perhaps that's where the... that's why Feldman Barrett theory is so helpful when discussing literary texts, because she stresses the role of language, and literary works are, of course, made of language and narratives.
Yasemin Nurcan Hacıoğlu
Absolutely. And I suppose I can give some examples of texts in which it's not only that the sort of emotions and narratives used but there's also... it's also drawn attention to that characters are sort of inserting emotions from this perspective. So one of the weirdest books... weirdest and most wonderful book that I touch on my in my thesis, is a hardly read novel by Amelia Opie called The Only Child; or, Portia Bellenden... An out of Print thing from the 1820s towards the end of Amelia Opie's career. And Amelia Opie is known as a author of, I suppose, moral tale fiction. She became a sort of darling of the Victorian period for writing tales of fallen women, women who's socially and sexually transgress and bad things happen to them as a response, usually, they end up dead and often... often glad they're going to die because they will set a good moral example for their children. So sort of, not popular now. But very popular at the time. But one of her sort of really strange later novels, The Only Child, is written in first person by a heroine who is journalizing. And, as she's journalizing, she sort of has emotional responses that don't make any sense in the immediate plot at all. For example, early in the novel, someone she thinks is going to propose to her doesn't, he leaves her for someone else... And Portia's response, the heroine Portia, within this genre, we might expect her to be repentant because her behavior was so and so. But instead, her emotional response is the feeling of bloodthirsty revenge. Which is really... just it doesn't make any sense. And then as the novel progresses, you kind of see how she is a master of textual and literary manipulation, she's always... she writes poems and sort of inserts emotions into them, and... that are not supposed to be there. Especially, I might add for a sort of moral feminine character, these are not the responses that a female character should be having. And what's really sort of, from a sort of nerdy perspective, what's sort of fascinating about this novel, is that Opie, the author, or I suppose, it's represented as the fictional character doing this, is that they highlight these emotional words for us. So there's all these strange emotional responses actually literally italicized in the text, in case we miss them. And I suppose from a perspective of predictive processing and distributed cognition together, it's about how... I don't know, it's about the text showing us that this character who's very well versed in literature, it says so in the text, and also loves writing and playing with text, has this tool to actually shape her own emotions, and has that sort of tool at her hand, the pen to sort of say, actually, at this moment, I'm feeling vengeful.
Stijn Vervaet
So are these poems, in a way, a working through her emotions, to some extend? Or could we rather see or perceive these novels as, as offering or contributing to a more fine grained understanding of the range of emotions known to readers at the time, or?
Yasemin Nurcan Hacıoğlu
Yeah, so she... what she represents herself as working through them. So she, what's wonderful is, this is another reason why there's this novel of sort of pure gold is because this is... this has been read as sort of borrowed moral women's fiction, but actually, it's so caught up in all sorts of ideas from romanticism and romantic writing and feeling at the time, so this, this character always says, Oh, these emotions are just naturally coming from me, and therefore I should follow through with them, which is a very romantic notion. So to add an even further layer of complexity, the character is kind of also using the genre of romanticism, or romantic writing as a tool, and saying, yes... yes, it is rather strange that I, something within me saying, I have... this character has to die, but it's a feeling I have, and therefore I have to do it. And I suppose that that's very interesting in terms of cultural forms, but I sort of, to answer your question, in terms of what does this do within society... As well as shaping her own thoughts, this character is represented as, in a very strange way, feeding emotional responses to other characters. So what she does is she goes up to rather simple characters, who are not the brightest. And she sort of says, by the way – often she gives them poems that kind of say, by the way, you feel like this, don't you? And then immediately, they sort of say, oh, yes, yes, this is exactly how I feel – And in fact, I thought of it myself. This, this is entirely my own thinking. And, to zoom out a bit on what that does, within the whole genre of the tale, what she does is she kind of convinces characters to do things to get her own way. And she also convinces them, and to a large part at times the reader, that this is working exactly as a moral tale should. She... she is a moral, just a ordinary moral lady learning of her wrong deeds, even though, as a consequence, if you sort of closely read the text, of her actions, she sort of bumps off and... and causes the deaths of characters in her way of marrying as she wants. And I suppose what's interesting about her using these characters as almost like puppets, by giving them emotional suggestions, is Opie's really playing with how emotions and narratives work within social understandings of women's morality. Because, as she reveals, there's such a fine line between absolute fiction, as in fiction that the heroine is writing and the heroine is using, and social thinking and all social narratives, and the fallen woman tale about what happens to a woman if she socially or politically transgresses. Opie really plays with how this is... This connects fiction with our independent thinking and also with social narratives of what will happen.
Stijn Vervaet
So was she to some extent then also mocking or making fun of the way in which readers tend to respond to those emotional poems or or to characters that are overreacting emotionally?
Yasemin Nurcan Hacıoğlu
I think so I... I think she pulls along the reader for long sections, and then after long sections, you realize, well, she said, she feels all these things, but actually, she's ended up somewhere completely different. And I think there are some very curious sections of the text that sort of demand being looked at further, which is where she's kind of telling characters, Oh, you feel this way? And they're like, oh, yeah, absolutely, I feel this way. And then, and then she's almost like a sort of scientist, sort of really messed up scientist, it's like, but why do you feel like that? That doesn't make any sense? Like you've said, she tells this really hapless character called Lord Annally, oh, you want to claim revenge for me, don't you? And she's like, oh, yeah, like, absolutely, I'm so angry. And she's like, she convinces him into this role to do her sort of dirty work for her. And then she's almost like a scientist, who's kind of like, can you... can you explain why, though? And he just, he just, he just makes things up. He can't, it makes no sense that he feels this way. So they're these text sections of the text that are sort of what Opie is almost, sort of psychologically or philosophically probing, to what extent manipulations work, when you sort of give people social or fictional narratives, that also give you a template for your behavior. Like, if she gives this male character the role of the revenge hero, he just goes with it, in the same way that the reader or other characters go with the moral tale narrative for a female character, because they're so familiar with it, that they sort of bulldoze through it with their thinking, whether it makes sense or not.
Stijn Vervaet
So to some extent, could we then read her novels as a kind of comment upon what was, at the time socially expected? Or what kind of emotions were socially acceptable? And is she going against the grain of what was socially acceptable for women in a patriarchal society? Or how do we move them from acceptable emotions on the one hand to kind of moral questions that touch upon much more broader topics in society?
Yasemin Nurcan Hacıoğlu
Yeah. So I suppose what my thesis or thinking of voice is suggesting that Opie is kind of inserting specific values into her texts that suggests, this is what we should do. Instead, what she's kind of demonstrating, is almost a method for how to tear apart and see the sort of intricate workings of how gendered narratives work, as I mentioned, both the fallen tale narrative and also text sort of narratives of heroic masculinity. So it's, it's almost like a philosophy of mind exercise. And, and of course, that I very much think that this is, this is a political contribution in itself, because it sort of shows, it's showing to the reader how you can test narratives and what formulates them. What emotions are expected from people of different genders, how an emotion is expected to mean that you think in a particular way, you will act in a particular way and, and that society will end up behaving in a particular way. Because characters who are not sort of versed in composition, they very much act like puppets who just sort of prod them onto these narratives and off they go. Whereas the character who can compose and of course, the readership of this, of these texts, I think, might not necessarily have access or be very familiar with the intricate workings of great political philosophers like Mary Wollstonecraft, but they will be versed in the politics of the story, the compositional strategies of poetry – they'll know what a tragedy is – so they will be able to see how, how these things link together. Yeah.
Stijn Vervaet
So these novels have actually a quite clear political potential. And they also do intervene in political and philosophical debates. You mentioned philosophy of mind. So how could we then understand that these women writers are actually participating in philosophical debates, not perhaps by writing treatises or pamphlets or polemical texts, but, in another way, that this is maybe perhaps not that obvious by first sight, or maybe in a way it has been overlooked by criticism so far?
Yasemin Nurcan Hacıoğlu
Yeah. Yeah, I think this is something that I very much want to develop, it's broadly how women's writing of the 18th century in an early 19th centuries is often linked to sentimentalism, and this sentimentalism is tied to a lack of agency. However, in the 18th century, such a focus in philosophy of mind is... are all these large questions about how we construct our thinking, and how we construct our moral thinking. And I just... I very much want to look further into how we can look at women's writing at the time — examples of women's writing at the time — as participating in these conversations and debates about philosophy of mind through characters and social narratives that depend on these extreme emotional responses. And, as I've suggested with Amelia Opie, if we read closely, we don't... we don't even have to dig that deep, because often you are... or there are examples of heroines who are prompting, who are almost experimentally prompting, emotions to show how they connect to morals and narratives and, and all sorts of thinking, and these sections are not really, they don't have to be there, they're not part of of the plot per se. So I think that's something that can be very much developed. And I think it's important as well, because it's another way of thinking about the contribution of writing, women's writing, at this time to politics. So it's not one way, to put it crudely, as you look in these texts and find how they connect to political ideas or specific political values. But another way, I suppose, coming back to the whole question from distributed mind of how we use texts in everyday life, if we look at... if we develop the sort of approach of composition, these texts actually model, or I don't know if we can even say teach readers how they... how they can do their own, if you want to say philosophical thinking, how you can probe how people depend on emotions, and morals, and narratives and how they see these constellations as fitting together. So it's not about these texts being didactic in terms of values, but in terms of actually presenting tools to female readership, to probe these questions, it's giving them sort of philosophical tools, as well as compositional tools.
Stijn Vervaet
So literature really as a kind of political philosophical laboratory on the one hand, and as really a kind of set of tools that readers then could not only reflect upon, but maybe also try out themselves.
Yasemin Nurcan Hacıoğlu
Absolutely.
Stijn Vervaet
You have also done archival work for your PhD research, meaning that you have not just been using printed editions of these artists, but also gone to look into perhaps their correspondence or their own notes, that they used as a kind of tool in terms of extended cognition or distributed cognition. Could you tell us something about the advantages or the need for archival research when we're discussing 18th century fiction specifically?
Yasemin Nurcan Hacıoğlu
I had a look at letters in which Amelia Opie is herself sending, to female members of her family, moral narratives of "if you get engaged to this man do you know what'll happen to you?". And this was an absolute delight to transcribe because I had sort of two librarians behind me, sort of trying to pick apart this sort of text, and it was like, if you will get engaged to this man, you will not only die, you... your eyes will dissolve, blood will pour out of them, your brain will pour out of your ears, you will bite your parents — we had a fantastic dialogue with the sort of librarian who was helping me trying to work... is that really bite? Yes, it's bite, you will bite your parents, and then... then you will die. Like so what's sort of... what this highlighted sort of amplified, or this, this is just one of the examples of quite a lot of archival work, but that one's a great, because it really shows that these are not just fictional narratives, Opie's handing them out as... as actual, real material. And not only that, in this particular example, she's given the names and biographical information of the people this has happened to. So this sort of incredible, appreciating, the incredible work that these fictional narratives... that she's publishing at the same time as doing this. These... how far fictional and moral and social narratives about women's behavior are intertwined. It's, it's interesting how Opie plays on all sorts of ends with with that sort of stuff.
Stijn Vervaet
So it's really impossible to disentangle literature and life or letters in life.
Yasemin Nurcan Hacıoğlu
Yeah. Particularly when you have a figure like Amelia Opie, who sort of was writing... is writing the stuff as well as fictional sets. She's a very strange... biographically, I think she must have been a very strange person.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah. You've worked mostly on English fiction or fiction written in English, but you also read Russian and you have some plans to work on authors from Russia as well? So could you tell us something about your plans? And how, perhaps have these literary models, that you discuss in your PhD thesis, have migrated from England to Russia? Was it through France? Or was it through Germany? Or was it directly? Could you tell us something about your future research, or your plans to?
Yasemin Nurcan Hacıoğlu
I found that in Russian literature by women and non-binary writers, this form of the cliched Gothic poem within a gothic tale is very much used. And then I had a look at some fantastic work by people like Katherine Bowers, her looking at how authors such as Ann Radcliffe was with The Mysteries of Udolpho... were extremely popular within the early 19th century Russian context, to the extent that there were fake Ann Radcliffe novels all over the place. And these sort of migrated via French translation, and some of them were also made up. And some of them were books that were not by Ann Radcliffe, just given a different name. And I suppose, well, I'm not supposing, because, I sort of, it's in the texts, for example, in Durova/Aleksandrov's short story, The Sulphur Spring, who is a non-binary author, they are interested very much... so that the heroine of that plot composes a poem, a very cliche Gothic poem. And then there's a sort of long section after that, in which the character and another character are discussing how composition works. And I was thinking well, like bingo, and not only that, but Durova/Aleksandrov writes in their autobiography that they... they're a fan of Ann Radcliffe. So what I'm interested in is not like saying, oh, British authors influenced the Russian context, what I'm interested in is the potential, that this conversation about philosophy of mind, particularly in regard to gender and agency, was something that was continued through conversation and debate through this very popular cultural, accessible literary form, sort of trans-Europe, like, across countries. Yeah.
Stijn Vervaet
You mentioned now the name of Nadezhda Durova. And you told that she was a non-binary person. So could you tell us something about her biography? She has had a fascinating life, hasn't she?
Yasemin Nurcan Hacıoğlu
Yeah. So there's currently some work in progress by Dr Margarita Vaysman, on revising our thinking about Durova/Aleksandrov's gender identity based on archival evidence of how they write about their own experience. But to say a bit about how they are represented within the popular imagination in Russian culture now... so Durova/Aleksandrov is represented patriotically as a woman who cross-dressed as a man, so that they could join the Napoleonic Wars. And they became an officer and then retired to write Gothic trash fiction. Most importantly, obviously, that's obviously the most important part. Yeah, so it would be interesting, it is important, not just interesting, to look, I think, at the history of Russian 19th century, fiction or any historical fiction, to show that genders beyond woman and man are represented within Russian romanticism, are at the heart of it, and they're part of these ideas of how gender and agency and composition work. So, this is not new, this is central to writing that was in high regard. So for example, Pushkin was, was publishing, Durova/Aleksandrov's work, and so yeah, so they were right in there with Russian romanticism, which is often, which is not only... the romanticism is not just connected to sort of this highly idealistic sort of great aesthetics, it's also very much connected to national idealism, so that's an interesting avenue, I think.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, thank you for that. To conclude, I would like to ask you whether you have a reading recommendation for our listeners.
Yasemin Nurcan Hacıoğlu
Oh, yes. So I like any romantic period novel with the word confessions in it, because like it usually, it's usually like, indicated that these narrators are literally going to be talking to demons. And that's sort of the best kind of romantic novels, for example, James Hogg. But coming to the stuff that I've looked at, in my dissertation, Charlotte Dacre’s, Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer. So that's, that's another novel that's generally been seen as following the structure of a moral tale, ultimately. But I think when you look at those wonderful poems, you can see that it's actually a bit more complicated, that there's, I think there's, there's more work to be done there, really, as well as it being a good read. So in the poems, the narrator changes gender, and also the heroine of the novel often perceives her actions through the prism of them being masculine heroic actions, again, a little bit like the work done in Opie, but to a greater extent. So she doesn't measure her success by being a good heroine. She measures that by being a good hero. And I think that's been overlooked very much by categorizing these types of works as just women's moral fiction – how conservative is it? – overlooks how, like, this confession... is in dialogue with all sorts of very complicated romantic with a corporate capital R confessions and does some really interesting work.
Stijn Vervaet
Thank you.