Francesca Saggini

By: Francesca Saggini
Subjects: Literature

FREE ACCESS, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10509585.2023.2181407

Introduction to

By: Francesca Saggini
Subjects: Literature

In Open Access, free to download

Francesca Saggini (2023) Frances Burney: A Houstory, European Romantic Review, 34:2, 223-242, DOI: 10.1080/10509585.2023.2181487

This article maps Frances Burney’s life and works from the vantage point of material studies, considering the houses the author lived, sojourned, and worked in. The tension between the contending discourses of “public” house and “private” house—the house as a space for entertainment and a cultural hub used to promote visibility and augment cultural capital, as opposed to the “private” house as the locus of intimacy and family life—is exemplified by the juxtaposition between the houses Frances Burney lived in as her father’s daughter (in particular the famous house at 35 St. Martin’s Street, London) and the idyllic Surrey dwellings Burney moved into with her husband, Alexandre d’Arblay, after 1793. This article will consider the symbolic, often mythopoetic value associated with Burney’s houses as artificial, cultural mythoi and her poetics of indirect, oblique association to accrue cultural and social capital.

By: Francesca Saggini
Subjects: Literature

Two video highlights commissioned for my project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No [892230] can be retrieved by clicking on the link

https://www.mcgill.ca/burneycentre/ >About>News.

Enjoy!

By: Francesca Saggini
Subjects: Literature

This essay explores the character of Cerulia in Frances Burney’s dramatic play, Hubert de Vere, composed and revised in the 1790s, yet never published or staged in Burney’s lifetime.
Cerulia seems to eschew any easy dramatic categorization, as she cannot be identified with the heroine of the play. Undeniably, she is a victim, but of whom/what, we may wonder? Does attempting to define the nature of the hamartia of which Cerulia remains victim lead the “ideal” reader/viewer toward either fate/the gods or, rather, social apparatuses? And, finally, what about the eponymous protagonist Hubert de Vere? Is it correct to identify de Vere as the actant “hero”, or perhaps as per the sub-category “villain hero” so popular in late eighteenth-century dramas?
Burney’s adroit exploitation of tropology and literary allusion in Hubert de Vere will be at the centre of this essay. In particular, I will examine the last act of the play, where the themes of confinement, imprisonment, and escape take on tragic hues. Though unpublished until 1995, these scenes are among the most vivid and, indeed, the most shocking Burney ever wrote. It is my contention that a long overdue appraisal of female characterisation in Hubert de Vere can shed novel light –at once both disturbing and liberating– on Frances Burney’s oeuvre at large.

OPEN ACCESS

Saggini F. The wolf, the lamb, and the big “Oh!”: voids, (w)holes, and epitaphic emptiness in Frances Burney’s Hubert de Vere [version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review]. Open Res Europe 2023, 3:138 (https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.16439.1)

Saggini F. The wolf, the lamb, and the big “Oh!”: voids, (w)holes, and epitaphic emptiness in Frances Burney’s Hubert de Vere [version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review]. Open Res Europe 2023, 3:138 (https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.16439.1)

Saggini F. The wolf, the lamb, and the big “Oh!”: voids, (w)holes, and epitaphic emptiness in Frances Burney’s Hubert de Vere [version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review]. Open Res Europe 2023, 3:138 (https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.16439.1)

By: Francesca Saggini
Subjects: Art & Visual Culture, Gender & Intersectionality Studies, Literature

The seminar builds on the research experience of four speakers who have been
engaged in different yet complementing ways with the exploration of issues of
portraiture, cultural capital, and memorialisation in adjoining artistic ecologies.
According to the then/now heuristic approach, each panellist will discuss from
the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspective the portrait of a
representative figure of Romanticism and map its multi-layered afterlives for
different purposes across time. What is lost and what is gained in these
transartistic, transcultural and transhistoric traffics? Is an author portrait a
biographical, an autobiographical or rather an autobiografictive act? And what
can transmediations and transculturation contribute to our knowledge of
Romantic politics as well as their later appropriation and resignification?
Among the topics discussed in this seminar: the portrait and/in the public
sphere; transhistorical constructions of authorship; portraiture and street art;
transmedia authors; portraits in State documents and objects. The case studies
the speakers engage with explore the multi-sided domain of Romantic
portraiture and its afterlives in relation to: Jane Austen, Frances Burney; Walter
Scott; Toussaint Louverture.
The speakers for this Seminar are Dr Valentina Aparicio (Queen Mary,
University of London), Dr Rita J. Dashwood (University of Liverpool), Prof.
Francesca Saggini (University of Edinburgh), Prof. Anna Enrichetta Soccio
(Università di Chieti).

By: Francesca Saggini
Subjects: Museum and Heritage Studies , Other

Deconstructionism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and similarly sophisticated hermeneutic tools of contemporary analysis have explored, interpreted, and often over-interpreted texts. Today, my talk wishes to move the focus of discussion back to the author, whose death was predicted perhaps too hastily in the 1960s and 1970s, in particular back to the materiality surrounding authorship. I shall direct my analysis to the author’s writing desk and to the neglected heuristic and hermeneutic potential of this humble piece of furniture. My presentation will provide a broad canvas of investigation, to then zero in on the writing desks of Samuel Richardson, William Cowper, Jane Austen and Frances Burney, among others. I shall provide a ppt with essential images to encourage discussion among the participants.

By: Francesca Saggini
Subjects: Literature

Following a sell-out event at Leatherhead Library in October, we are delighted to announce a second event about the author Frances Burney.

The face that launched a thousand books: Sleuthing in Surrey with Frances Burney

Ever since the rise of mass publishing during the eighteenth century, the readers' curiosity has demanded to find satisfaction in associating an author's face with their work. The presence of illustrated frontispieces is only one among many manifestations of this desire to give a material body and a face to the authors of fiction. Author portraiture contributed considerably to what was quickly to become a true celebrity market. In her talk, Francesca Saggini will retrace the cultural and economic elements of visual authorship by taking Frances Burney as her case study. Francesca's journey of literary detection will find an amazing, and truly unexpected, conclusion in Surrey. Which face for Frances? We will all be invited to take our pick from the gallery of pictures illustrating this talk.

The event will take place on:

• Thursday 2 February 2023 at Leatherhead Library, Church Street, Leatherhead, from 7.30pm to 8.30pm.

Tickets cost £5. Book your ticket for The Face that Launched 1000 Books.

A partnership event between Surrey Heritage and Surrey Libraries.

By: Francesca Saggini
Subjects: History, Literature

The Press in the Garden: Rediscovering Frances Burney's Surrey by Francesca Saggini

• Tuesday 25 October from 7.30pm until 8.30pm

Frances Burney (1752-1840), also known as Fanny Burney, was a novelist, diarist and playwright. In this talk, Francesca Saggini will explore her close links with Surrey in the 1790s, her marriage to the French exile, Alexandre d'Arblay at Mickleham on 28 July 1793 and the three houses that she called home around Great Bookham: Phoenice Farm, Fair Field House and Camilla Cottage. For Burney, recovering from a stifling Royal appointment at Court, these were precious places of intimacy in a rural setting that inspired her creativity and led to the publication of her popular novel, Camilla, or a Picture of Youth (1796). These cottage gardens, set in Surrey's countryside provided a retreat from the world, a precious place where Burney could grow as a writer and develop her literary career.

A partnership event between Surrey Heritage and Surrey Libraries.

Tickets are £5. Book your ticket on The Press in the garden event booking site.

By: Francesca Saggini
Subjects: Literature

June 13, 2022. In this talk I shall look at the construction of the death of Dr Charles Burney in Memoirs of
Doctor Burney, Arranged from His Own Manuscripts from Family Papers, and from
Personal Recollections (3 vols, 1832) by his daughter, Madame d’Arblay.

By: Francesca Saggini
Subjects: Literature

21 April 2022, 5pm BST

Romantic Theatre Studies: state-of-the-field and new ways forward

The seminar builds on the research and teaching experience of five speakers operating in four national contexts (Ireland, Italy, UK, USA) to draw a tentative map of the evolving domain of Theatre Studies from a transdisciplinary and multinational perspective. Each panellist will present their present and future engagement with Romantic Theatre Studies by way of their research projects and current scholarship. Among the topics discussed in this seminar: Theatre and Disability, Theatre Econom(etr)ics, Theatre and Celebrity, Theatre and Gender, Opening the Romantic Theatre Canon. Issues of pedagogy and stage revival will be addressed as well, with Romantic Theatre in the classroom, on stage and in the canon. Two speakers will be able to share their experience as major EU-funded awardees, addressing the call of/for public-facing humanities and Theatre Studies.

Our speakers include Sarah Burdett (St Mary’s University), Helen Dallas (University of Oxford), Essaka Joshua (Notre Dame University), David O’Shaughnessy (NUI Galway), Francesca Saggini (University of Edinburgh).