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[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.]
My name's Rose. Rose Pallister. Um, and I'm a professor of 18th century studies and the faculty of English at the University of Oxford.

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Um, and I have been teaching here for some 30 years.

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Um, probably the most relevant piece of information about me is I taught a masters course for several years, uh,

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called The Fictions of Fantasy, that looked at 18th century fantasy literature or the idea of fantasy in 18th century fiction.

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Well, I suppose because I'm working 19th century literature.

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Um, for me it's particularly linked with theories of the imagination in the 18th century and fantasising that kind of the,

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the original meaning is to make something visible, to make something apparent.

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Um, and it's linked to the imagination and, and I'm really interested in 18th century theories of mind.

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And one of the series of mind that's very, you know,

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built building on John Locke and sort of explicated in Addison's essays on the pleasures of the imagination,

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is this idea that, um, you have a kind of primary sense experience, and then you revisit the experience itself in your imagination.

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Um, so the, the thing that stimulated you is absent, but you remake that experience,

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and that can often be through a kind of imaginative construction of another world,

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which is a sort of, um, which stimulates you in a similar way to the way that landscape or um,

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uh, yeah, landscape or sort of particularly visual excitement.

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The 18th century is probably the world of the moment at which the visual becomes the primary sense.

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So I suppose I think of fantasy as being a sort of strongly visual secondary sense experience, um, often communicated through art.

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Um, particularly interested in the ways that literary arts can, um, give you that embodied experience.

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I gave a talk today on fairy tale, so it's at the front of my mind. But I do think the late 17th century.

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I think that group of writers shall shell people.

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I'm a huge fan of Marie Donoghue, and I don't think people have read enough of her one to tales.

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They're more widely available now than they were. Um, Donkey skin is one of the great fairy tales,

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and I think she's extremely good at capturing that kind of passage through sort of sorrow to triumph that the fairy tale can often tell.

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Um, so I guess I would think if you were going to go and read, I would say, look at that.

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Some great little collections of wonder tales, um, from the 17th century.

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Um, nap translations from this little paperback just called Wonder Tales.

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When I talk to my lecture. I am making my way slowly through the Outlander series and I am enjoying those.

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And I do think they're a kind of fantasy fiction. I suppose what I would say is I'm really interested in historical fiction that

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is coming very close to what we would now call sort of speculative fiction.

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So the idea of a kind of, um, the past being another world that you can, um, reinvent.

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Um, I'm not a great fan of Julia Quinn's Bridgerton novels, per se, but I think the Bridgerton television series is a wonderful bit of fantasy,

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actually, with re narrates the Regency period in terms of a sort of very different way of thinking about racial politics and that kind of.

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Um, Cross-racial casting has been really interesting to me.

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Hamilton, I think, is an amazing piece of fantasy.

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Um, it's a fantasy musical, but it's just kind of re narrates the past by sort of doing something slightly,

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sort of very wilfully anachronistic, which is shocking.

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That makes you also sort of look again at things that seem familiar.

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And I think maybe that is a really important aspect of fantasy is to give you, is to get you again in that very strongly visual sense.

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Let's look again at what we thought we knew. Retell it from a different angle.

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Repopulate it. And that will, so long as we bear in mind that sort of fantastic nature.

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Do you think and don't think that it's somehow giving us a sort of legitimate or true representation?

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It gets you to see and think differently. Maybe that's one of the best qualities of fantasy.

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Well, I suppose listening to some of the talks today,

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I was wondering whether in some ways it might become so dominant a category that it loses its category of sort of distinctiveness.

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I mean, I think it's such a familiar mode now.

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You know, it's a place where people experiment, um, that I sort of think the kind of complaint that it's sort of devalued or not recognised.

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I just I don't recognise that myself now. I think it's become quite literary and thoroughly mainstream, really.

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Um, I think a lot of those boundaries between sort of, um, um, oral, um, written forms are breaking down anyway.

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Um, I sort of I really like the fact that so much of, uh, writing now happens in these sort of virtual spaces.

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Um, so, um, I mean, I think it's going to flourish, but I think it's in some ways it's sort of at the point when something acquires enormous power,

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it doesn't need that sort of doesn't need to be marked off and made categorically distinct.

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And I think that's likely to happen. I mean, I suppose I.

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I do. I have. I do think of it in general ways, and I do think of it as a kind of, um, I don't even think that's a literary style, really.

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Uh, I was most influenced by. I don't know whether anyone's talked about him is a theorist called Slavoj Zizek that I said he.

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Okay. Um, and he talks he has an essay called Traversing the Fantasy.

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Uh, and he has a he's a sort of psychoanalytic cultural critic, a lot of his works in film.

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But one of his key arguments is that we need to think.

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Again about fantasy. And he said, what fantasy is, is a sort of story that covers up a void.

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So he he sort of actually, when we traverse a fantasy, we travel through fantasy.

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So we recognise, um, that there is no actual true object of desire, that we're always just in pursuit of that object.

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So I kind of like that insight, and I think perhaps it's a way that we ought to be thinking about fantasy more, um, as a kind of.

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Story that is trying to cover up the impossibility of our meeting our desires, rather than a story that's expression of the desire.

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If that makes sense, as a distinction. Um, and that means for Zizek, that actually means sort of staying with the story, uh,

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and not expecting it to deliver some kind of absolute sort of consolation or substitution of what you cannot have.

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There's a way in which science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction can be a really good way of addressing those concerns.

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Um, sort of giving you another world to look at it from.

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One of my ex-students, actually, Laura Bagley's just published a Ya fiction called dirt, which I've just started reading and I'm really enjoying.

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It's a kind of a sort of eco parable romance.

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Um. Clever and persuasive and thoughtful.

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So I think and I think that was what I was trying to touch on that in an odd way,

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the supernatural can remind you of your responsibility to the natural world,

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to the environment, to the world around you in a way that perhaps sort of eco politics doesn't kind of, uh, fails to sometimes fail to do that.

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It can be so earnestly, uh, moral and self sacrificing that it doesn't spark people's imaginations to care about,

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um, the ecology and the environment as well. So, yeah.

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So I, I'm kind of hoping that that might be the, uh, another potential, um, future.

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For fantasy, sort of encouraging us to think responsibly about environment.

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And creatively about it as well.