Francesca Saggini
@unitus.it
DISTU
Tuscia University
Scopus Publications
Scholar Citations
Scholar h-index
Scholar i10-index
Scopus Publications
Francesca Saggini
F1000 Research Ltd
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 Though unpublished until 1995, these scenes are among the most vivid and, indeed, the most shocking Burney ever wrote.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.
Francesca Saggini
Informa UK Limited
ABSTRACT 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.
Carmen Casaliggi, Francesca Saggini, and Maximiliaan van Woudenberg
Informa UK Limited
Opening the Gatehouse: On and Around “Housing Romanticism” Carmen Casaliggi , Francesca Saggini b,c and Maximiliaan van Woudenberg Department of Humanities, Cardiff Metropolitan University, Cardiff, UK; School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK; Dipartimento di studi linguistico-letterari, storicofilosofici e giuridici, Università degli Studi della Tuscia, Viterbo, Italy; Humanities and Social Sciences, Sheridan Institute of Technology, Oakville, Canada; Clare Hall, Cambridge, UK
Francesca Saggini
Springer International Publishing
Francesca Saggini
Routledge
Janet Larson, Francesca Saggini, and Anna-Enrichetta Soccio
Informa UK Limited
What is this thing made of bricks and mortar, poured concrete, cinder block, fieldstone, fitted logs or baked mud – with roofs peaked or corrugated, stairwells spiralling from widows’ walks to cellars, dirty floors or carpets, windows or none, balconies, thresholds, hand-stitched mats or velvet armchairs, secret passages, locks matched with keys – that we denominate a ‘house’? Rendered seemingly unproblematic by their concrete substantiality, and incontestable for their human necessity, sheltering ‘poor, bare, forked’ creatures from the elements, houses present themselves as secure spaces for confirming the identities of their inhabitants, defending ‘inside’ against ‘outside’, the ‘private’ from the ‘public’, and upholding – within four walls – a sense of stability against the ravages of change. Houses are imagined, built, inhabited by time and history, by events and their effects, in a story that repeats and revises itself even as we write. For when economic hard times evaporate jobs and mortgage banks fail or go on rampages of ‘collection’, the house as a financial liability upends all reassuring housing fictions. Mental constructions of security are now becoming distressingly mobile and defenceless, sold at a discount or up for sale indefinitely, decaying in weedy lots or on streets emptied of neighbours. The once-inhabitants – in theory house dwellers, owners, makers – are ‘foreclosed’ from anywhere to live except ‘tent cities’, car parks and public shelters, relatives’ couches or cardboard squares spread on asphalt. It also becomes increasingly difficult to imagine houses as secure shelters in a world in a state of flow, its living spaces continually renegotiated, rewritten, restructured or dismantled by diasporas, resettlements, border-crossings, the forced migrations of war and extreme weather events, and the myriad other transformations of identity, economics, culture, society and habitat that attend globalization and, most recently, the upheavals of ‘democratization’. Meanwhile, emerging from and riding these global currents in time and space, new creative styles, genres, lingos, authors, and makers of visual art keep on coming. Reading their constructions of the house is reading the discourses of contemporaneity and the human. In proposing a special issue on the house in writing, art and culture from 1950 to the present, we began with questions like these: how, when, where, is the house not (just) a space ‘in four walls’? How is the inhabited dwelling both a lived experience and the image of an episteme, something produced through and producing subjective experiences of time and space? What do houses shelter or by definition exclude? What