OpeRaNew · Opening Romanticism: Reimagining Romantic Drama for New Audiences
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-01-07 → 2023-08-18
- EU contribution
- €212,934
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Opening Romanticism: Reimagining Romantic Drama for New Audiences
The OpeRaNew project unlocks the potential in the forgotten dramatic plays of Frances Burney (1742-1840), a talented writer from the Romantic era. It aimed to undertake a critical and digital analysis of the court dramas written by Burney during her years of service at the court of King George III (1786-1791) and revised in the following decade. It demonstrated the perspicacity and potential of highlighting these unpublished plays, which were neglected during the author's lifetime and remained obscure for over two centuries. Additionally, the project created a corpus of contemporary plays ranging from c.1750 to 1820 to offer textual and contextual comparison to Burney’s overlooked dramas. Many stakeholders from academia and various organizations participated in productive discussions, both in person and online, about exploring Romanticism and the overlooked dramatic works of Burney. Topics discussed included creativity, authorship, body politics, oppression, gender-related violence, the literary market, familial and social systems, and their impact. Additionally, the project spread through various events that created knowledge and encouraged exchange and two-way communication. The lessons learned demonstrate the social benefits of unleashing the potential of neglected artwork with urgently contemporary implications. Moreover, it confirmed that Open Science and Citizen Science have a major influence on research and innovation activities.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
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.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH · EdinburghCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union