Backstage in the novel: Frances Burney and the theater arts

In Backstage in the Novel, Francesca Saggini traces theunique interplay between fiction and theater in the eighteenth century through an examination of thework of the English novelist, diarist, and playwright Frances Burney.

Moving beyond the basicidentification of affinities between the genres, Saggini establishes a literary-cultural contextfor Burney's work, considering the relation between drama, a long-standing tradition, and thestill-emergent form of the novel.

Through close semiotic analysis,intertextual comparison, and cultural contextualization, Saggini highlights the extensivemetatextual discourse in Burney's novels, allowing the theater within the novels to surface.

Saggini's comparative analysis addresses, among other elements, textual structures, plots,characters, narrative discourse, and reading practices.

The author explores the theatrical andspectacular elements that made the eighteenth-century novel a hybrid genre infused with dramaticconventions.

She analyzes such conventions in light of contemporary theories of reception and of therole of the reader that underpinned eighteenth-century cultural consumption.

In doing so,Saggini contextualizes the typical reader-spectator of Burney's day, one who kept abreastof the latest publications and was able to move effortlessly between "high" (sentimental, dramatic)and "low" (grotesque, comedic) cultural forms that intersected on the stage.

Backstage in the Novel aims to restore to Burney's entire literary corpus thedimensionality that characterized it originally.

It is a vivid, close-up view of a writer whooperated in a society saturated by theater and spectacle and who rendered that dramatic text intonarrative.

More than a study of Burney or an overview of eighteenth-century literature andtheater, this book gives immediacy to an understanding of the broad forces informing, and channeledthrough, Burney's life and work.