Prof. Dr. Francesca Saggini – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Prof. Dr. Francesca Saggini

Tuscia University, Italy
English Literature

External Senior Fellow
Marie S. Curie FCFP Fellow
March 2020 – June 2020

Last Update: 31.08.2020

Curriculum Vitae

Dr. Francesca Saggini is Professor in English Literature at the Università degli Studi della Tuscia (Viterbo), Italy. She is the author of The Gothic Novel and the Stage. Romantic Appropriations (2015, Honourable mention at the ESSE Book Awards), Backstage in the Novel: Frances Burney and the Theater Arts (2012, Walken Cowen Memorial Prize for an outstanding work in eighteenth-century studies) and La messinscena dell’identità. Teatro e teatralità nel romanzo inglese del Settecento (2004, ‘Mario di Nola’ Prize awarded by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei). Francesca’s main field of research is popular culture, in particular adaptations and afterlives. Recent publications include Transmedia Creatures. Frankenstein’s Afterlives (co-ed. Anna Enrichetta Soccio, 2018), Gothic Frontiers (co-ed. Glennis Byron, 2012), Housing Fictions. The House in Writing and Culture, 1950 to the Present (co-ed. Janet Larson and Anna Enrichetta Soccio, 2012), The House of Fiction as the House of Life. Representations of the House in Literature and Culture, from Richardson to Woolf (co-ed. Anna Enrichetta Soccio, 2012). She has written extensively on Frances Burney, Jane Austen, the Romantic canon, the Gothic and its transformations across genres and periods. Francesca is the recipient of several international fellowships, including the ASECS-McGill Burney Fellowship (2015); the Lucy Cavendish College Visiting Research Fellowship (2017); the IASH Visiting Research Fellowship (2019).

Selected Publications

2018 Francesca Saggini, Anna Enrichetta Soccio eds. Transmedia Creatures: “Frankenstein”’s Afterlives. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Pp. 310.
2015 The Gothic Novel and the Stage: Romantic Appropriations. London: Pickering & Chatto. Pp. 310.
2014 Francesca Saggini ed. ‘Miss Tully’, Narrative of a 10 Years’ Residence at Tripoli. Vol. 3 in ‘Women’s Travel Writing in the North Africa and the Middle East’, three-volume set edited by Lois Chaber, Francesca Saggini, Carl Thompson. London: Pickering & Chatto. Pp. xxvii+434.
2014 ‘“Compared to these Italian trills are tame.” One Hundred Years of Robert Burns in Italy.’ The Reception of Robert Burns in Europe. Murray Pittock ed. London-New York: Bloomsbury. Pp. 115-42.
2012 Backstage in the Novel. Frances Burney and the Theater Arts. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Pp. 336.

FRIAS Project

The Stage That Was Not: An Interdisciplinary Reappraisal of Frances Burney’s ‘Edwy and Elgiva’

My project of research offers a new dimension to the appraisal of the tragic works composed by Frances Burney (1752-1840), an author who until fairly recently was best known for her brilliant novels of manners, through looking at several complementing strands: theatre, drama, and the novel.

I shall maximize the results of my research time by focusing on Edwy and Elgiva, staged for a single night on 21 March 1795. Relying on linguistic analysis, I shall establish a corpus of long-neglected texts chosen for their thematic, aesthetic and/or generic affinity with Burney’s tragedy. This corpus provides the basis of my project: the stage reconstruction of Egwy and Elgiva in a virtual environment combining hypertextual MOO tools with three-dimensional multimedia reconstructions, here applied to theatrical performance. This exercise in the archaeology of reception will involve the retrieval and analysis of a substantial body of indirect explanatory evidence, useful to reconstruct how Edwy and Elgiva would have appeared to contemporary spectators.

My project offers an opportunity of staging (albeit virtually) a long-neglected historical drama, recontextualized within its original compositional and production matrix. The innovative quality of the proposed project is due to its ambitious, and thoroughly interdisciplinary, combination of complementary fields, while the construction of an open-access virtual environment for research and teaching ensures wide availability to its outcomes.