Opening Romanticism: Reimagining Romantic Drama for New Audiences

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The substantial bibliography devoted to the work of Frances Burney (1757-1840) has confirmed her stature as an author, but it has left the dramatic works that she wrote during her years at the Court of George III almost untouched. The long-delayed publication of these plays has prevented critics from addressing them. For the few scholars who have dealt with them, these texts remain devoid of dramatic qualities. I posit that this quartet of tragedies prompts our critical thinking in terms of such present-day practices and policies as gender relations, body politics, agency: the plays raise many provocative questions, and our current complex juncture seems an especially apt moment to grant them a long-overdue audience as well as a stage. Burney’s speaking bodies—particularly the female ones—unmask and debunk the fraught relationship of the individual with social and state apparatuses, social forces and techniques of disciplining, whose coercions become dangerously naturalised. OpeRaNew aims to restore to Burney’s small dramatic corpus the cultural depth that has been lost over time. By using digital methods alongside literary analysis, the project constructs an expanding multimedia ecology for Burney’s plays—a capacious mediascape that aspires to reproduce, through contemporary tools and channels of communication, the Romantic theatre experience. The action’s core agenda—whose dynamic conversations are evoked by the verb ‘to open’ in the project title—advocates the engagement with an interested public beyond scholarly communities. The project not only sheds light on the overlooked dramatic works of a highly versatile Romantic woman author, but it shows the perspicacity and research potential of positioning—precisely at a time of enormous paradigmatic shifts in research communication and dissemination—some long-neglected playtexts, relegated to critical obscurity for over two centuries, within an expansive mediascape capable of placing them, finally, in the limelight.