Member of the Month: Nicole Horejsi
How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
I fell in love with the eighteenth century when I first saw Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons (1988) as a teenager, and again when I encountered Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina and Frances Burney’s Evelina in an undergraduate course, “The Age of Wit.” Both texts were unlike anything I had ever encountered before, and I was hungry to study the women writers who were underrepresented in my other coursework. Yet it wasn’t until graduate school that I embraced the long eighteenth century as a serious field of study. I entered grad school as a medievalist, intent on researching Arthurian romance, but Felicity Nussbaum’s course on the Bluestockings, which I took during my first semester at UCLA, expanded my horizons so that I could never return. I saw how capacious romance was, as a category, in the long eighteenth century, and the role played by women writers in shaping eighteenth-century fiction, and seized the opportunity to change fields. My dissertation began that very semester with my research on Clara Reeve’s literary-critical dialog, The Progress of Romance (1785).
What are you working on right now? I’ve just finished my first book project, Novel Cleopatras: Romance Historiography and the Dido Tradition in English Fiction, 1688-1785. It is forthcoming in early 2019 from the University of Toronto Press, and includes chapters on Jane Barker, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Fielding, and Clara Reeve. In this project, I extend the tradition of rereading Dido into the eighteenth century, taking up a single national literature and a specific genre—epic’s rival, the novel—at a time when women were entering into the literary marketplace on an unprecedented scale. I argue that writers eager to complicate their classical heritage find in Virgilian epic—with its sympathy, however limited, for Dido’s plight—the groundwork for inventing new histories and mythologies for contemporary readers traditionally marginalized by classical authority. Turning away from the formal and ideological exclusivity of epic and history, which require Dido’s demise, these writers take advantage of the emerging genre of the novel to create a parallel, supplementary, and even competing tradition for eighteenth-century readers. Because Dido and the historical figure whom she represents—Cleopatra—take center stage in the twin projects of reimagining epic and history, I contend that turning to the doomed queens who haunted the Roman imagination enables eighteenth-century novelists to seize the productive overlap among genres—history, romance, novel, even epic—and therefore to disrupt one of the founding narratives of Western civilization and rewrite it for their own ends.
At the same time, I’ve been working on a second book project entitled Enlightenment Timescapes. In this project, I’ve been examining the role of classical allusion as a chief mediator of Britain’s cultural identity, taking up the ways in which classicism creates a companion discourse to the orientalism documented by Edward Said in the context of nineteenth-century Britain and Europe. I argue that, like orientalizing, classicizing needn’t necessarily function in the service of British “allochronism,” the term coined by Johannes Fabian, in his classic critique of anthropology (1983), to describe the relegation of foreign cultures to distant times. Instead, I’m interested in the ways in which eighteenth-century writers disrupt the allochronic impulse that often characterizes accounts of foreign encounters. From fiction to non-fiction, from Restoration theater to eighteenth-century travel narratives, these writers seek to re- and disorient Britain’s place—political, cultural, and ideological—on the global stage. I argue that, by rendering transparent the fictions underwriting temporality itself, eighteenth-century writers resist teleological narratives and, in doing so, embrace the complexities of allusion to engender varying degrees of imaginative—and sometimes real—proximity to foreign peoples and cultures. In revisiting Britain’s dynamic relationship to its classical heritage, I advocate that scholars take seriously the complexities of classicism as a parallel discourse to orientalism in order to re-evaluate how writers deploy ideas about classical culture in representations of cultural difference. If orientalizing often exoticizes the East, collapsing disparate cultures and relegating them to another time, classicizing generates the potential, at least, of a neutral temporality in which the past mediates between self and other in the name of radical coevalness. Part of one of my chapters, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Oriental Timescapes,” is forthcoming in ECTI, and offers completely new ways of thinking about some of Montagu’s most famous letters.
How do you approach or incorporate gender or women’s studies in your work? Women writers and feminist criticism have always been enshrined at the very heart of my scholarship, and when I’m not writing about women, I’m usually writing about feminist approaches to male writers of the period. I’m particularly interested in engaging unexpected ways of thinking about female authorship, especially through the lens of eighteenth-century neoclassicism—or, more appropriately, neoclassicisms. For far too long, critics have by and large assumed that women weren’t agents of neoclassical culture in the same way as their male counterparts, simply because they didn’t have similar access to a classical education. But the history of eighteenth-century neoclassicism is much richer and more textured than it often appears; women writers play no small part in (re)invigorating neoclassical discourses, and I see the study of women in relation to neoclassical culture as an essential part of my career.
What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why?
As I often do when I’m immersed in a new project, I’ve been revisiting Joe Roach’s Cities of the Dead, Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996), an incredibly impressive book in which Roach seamlessly weaves together a variety of disciplines across several cultures and time periods in a rich tapestry of scholarship that exceeds the eighteenth century in order to rethink the relationship between the present and the past. Everything about this book appeals to me. But what always thrills me about Cities of the Dead is the way in which it embodies academic writing as a craft. I return to it again and again in order to lose myself in its lyrical and haunting prose, and to challenge myself to think more about my own voice and stylistic choices as a writer.
What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS? For me, supporting women in academia begins from the ground-up, at the undergraduate level: it’s our responsibility to create syllabi with women writers who fire the imaginations of our students, and to give them the tools necessary to move on to Ph.D. programs where they can continue to discover, and make contributions to, the body of scholarship on women writers. That said, we shouldn’t abandon these students when they become scholars themselves; I’d like to see the academy do more to support lecturers and our junior colleagues, both through networking opportunities and through financial assistance. I’m proud, of course, that the Women’s Caucus is already leading the way in these matters.
How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
I fell in love with the eighteenth century when I first saw Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons (1988) as a teenager, and again when I encountered Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina and Frances Burney’s Evelina in an undergraduate course, “The Age of Wit.” Both texts were unlike anything I had ever encountered before, and I was hungry to study the women writers who were underrepresented in my other coursework. Yet it wasn’t until graduate school that I embraced the long eighteenth century as a serious field of study. I entered grad school as a medievalist, intent on researching Arthurian romance, but Felicity Nussbaum’s course on the Bluestockings, which I took during my first semester at UCLA, expanded my horizons so that I could never return. I saw how capacious romance was, as a category, in the long eighteenth century, and the role played by women writers in shaping eighteenth-century fiction, and seized the opportunity to change fields. My dissertation began that very semester with my research on Clara Reeve’s literary-critical dialog, The Progress of Romance (1785).
What are you working on right now? I’ve just finished my first book project, Novel Cleopatras: Romance Historiography and the Dido Tradition in English Fiction, 1688-1785. It is forthcoming in early 2019 from the University of Toronto Press, and includes chapters on Jane Barker, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Fielding, and Clara Reeve. In this project, I extend the tradition of rereading Dido into the eighteenth century, taking up a single national literature and a specific genre—epic’s rival, the novel—at a time when women were entering into the literary marketplace on an unprecedented scale. I argue that writers eager to complicate their classical heritage find in Virgilian epic—with its sympathy, however limited, for Dido’s plight—the groundwork for inventing new histories and mythologies for contemporary readers traditionally marginalized by classical authority. Turning away from the formal and ideological exclusivity of epic and history, which require Dido’s demise, these writers take advantage of the emerging genre of the novel to create a parallel, supplementary, and even competing tradition for eighteenth-century readers. Because Dido and the historical figure whom she represents—Cleopatra—take center stage in the twin projects of reimagining epic and history, I contend that turning to the doomed queens who haunted the Roman imagination enables eighteenth-century novelists to seize the productive overlap among genres—history, romance, novel, even epic—and therefore to disrupt one of the founding narratives of Western civilization and rewrite it for their own ends.
At the same time, I’ve been working on a second book project entitled Enlightenment Timescapes. In this project, I’ve been examining the role of classical allusion as a chief mediator of Britain’s cultural identity, taking up the ways in which classicism creates a companion discourse to the orientalism documented by Edward Said in the context of nineteenth-century Britain and Europe. I argue that, like orientalizing, classicizing needn’t necessarily function in the service of British “allochronism,” the term coined by Johannes Fabian, in his classic critique of anthropology (1983), to describe the relegation of foreign cultures to distant times. Instead, I’m interested in the ways in which eighteenth-century writers disrupt the allochronic impulse that often characterizes accounts of foreign encounters. From fiction to non-fiction, from Restoration theater to eighteenth-century travel narratives, these writers seek to re- and disorient Britain’s place—political, cultural, and ideological—on the global stage. I argue that, by rendering transparent the fictions underwriting temporality itself, eighteenth-century writers resist teleological narratives and, in doing so, embrace the complexities of allusion to engender varying degrees of imaginative—and sometimes real—proximity to foreign peoples and cultures. In revisiting Britain’s dynamic relationship to its classical heritage, I advocate that scholars take seriously the complexities of classicism as a parallel discourse to orientalism in order to re-evaluate how writers deploy ideas about classical culture in representations of cultural difference. If orientalizing often exoticizes the East, collapsing disparate cultures and relegating them to another time, classicizing generates the potential, at least, of a neutral temporality in which the past mediates between self and other in the name of radical coevalness. Part of one of my chapters, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Oriental Timescapes,” is forthcoming in ECTI, and offers completely new ways of thinking about some of Montagu’s most famous letters.
How do you approach or incorporate gender or women’s studies in your work? Women writers and feminist criticism have always been enshrined at the very heart of my scholarship, and when I’m not writing about women, I’m usually writing about feminist approaches to male writers of the period. I’m particularly interested in engaging unexpected ways of thinking about female authorship, especially through the lens of eighteenth-century neoclassicism—or, more appropriately, neoclassicisms. For far too long, critics have by and large assumed that women weren’t agents of neoclassical culture in the same way as their male counterparts, simply because they didn’t have similar access to a classical education. But the history of eighteenth-century neoclassicism is much richer and more textured than it often appears; women writers play no small part in (re)invigorating neoclassical discourses, and I see the study of women in relation to neoclassical culture as an essential part of my career.
What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why?
As I often do when I’m immersed in a new project, I’ve been revisiting Joe Roach’s Cities of the Dead, Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996), an incredibly impressive book in which Roach seamlessly weaves together a variety of disciplines across several cultures and time periods in a rich tapestry of scholarship that exceeds the eighteenth century in order to rethink the relationship between the present and the past. Everything about this book appeals to me. But what always thrills me about Cities of the Dead is the way in which it embodies academic writing as a craft. I return to it again and again in order to lose myself in its lyrical and haunting prose, and to challenge myself to think more about my own voice and stylistic choices as a writer.
What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS? For me, supporting women in academia begins from the ground-up, at the undergraduate level: it’s our responsibility to create syllabi with women writers who fire the imaginations of our students, and to give them the tools necessary to move on to Ph.D. programs where they can continue to discover, and make contributions to, the body of scholarship on women writers. That said, we shouldn’t abandon these students when they become scholars themselves; I’d like to see the academy do more to support lecturers and our junior colleagues, both through networking opportunities and through financial assistance. I’m proud, of course, that the Women’s Caucus is already leading the way in these matters.
