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.