Backstage in the Novel: Frances Burney and the Theater Arts

Acknowledgments

xi Acknowledgments Writing a book is like undertaking a long journey through a changing landscape . Progress brings a distillation of experiences, memories, questions, and research—leading both inward and outward. Writing this book, through all of the various shapes it assumed as I traveled from one stage to the next, reached one turn after another, and shifted from viewpoint to viewpoint, has taken me almost fifteen years. It is the result of a complex process of inquiry and research that led from an analysis of the eighteenth-century novel to that of the multilayered contexts in which the novel is situated, and from the apparent bi-dimensionality of the written page to the multiple perspectives and codes of the performed text. Along the way, I paused at a succession of rest stops, engaging with the dimensions of performativity, of textual pragmatics, of urban studies, of iconography, and, finally, of the many forms and manifestations of culture, including popular culture and, especially, those counter-canonical cultural forms that have not been assimilated into canonical discourse or that have been repressed by it. I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to those institutions that have generously given this study their direct support,moral and financial,through its various seasons and mutations. In 2005, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei graciously awarded its “Mario di Nola” prize for the best Italian work of literary, philosophical, and historical scholarship to the original shorter Italian version of this book, La messinscena dell’identità. Teatro e teatralità nel romanzo inglese del Settecento. Among the members of the Accademia dei Lincei, I cannot but recall with the highest esteem Arnaldo Pizzorusso, renowned dix-huitiémiste, and Marcello Pagnini, the late and greatly missed master scholar of literature. My respectful thanks also to the University of Virginia Press, and particularly to the patrons of the Walker Cowen Memo- Acknowledgments xii rial Prize, who in 2005 took on the challenge of selecting for this prestigious international award an obscure book published in Italy, giving it the chance to begin a second life in a new, more polished form and a different language. The University of Virginia Press has given me a safe haven in difficult times, and for this I express my thanks to Penelope Kaiserlian and Angie Hogan, with deepest appreciation for their patience and understanding. I would also like to thank the Università degli Studi della Tuscia and Gaetano Platania, then the dean of the Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere di Viterbo, for granting me a short leave of absence during which I completed the revision of two central chapters of this book. For her impeccable contribution as translator, adviser, and friend, and for her solid interactive feedback on all of Burney’s various facets, my deep thanks to Laura Kopp. Without her linguistic wizardry and editorial expertise this manuscript would never have come to fruition, in this or another form. If her magic wand has not made every error disappear, the fault is entirely my own. Finally, I thank the global community of the Burney Society , and particularly Peter Sabor, whose meticulous scholarship allowed me to open the secret door to Frances Burney, dramatist, as long ago as 1995. Backstage in the Novel: Frances Burney and the Theater Arts is the result of a complex process of revision and updating of La messinscena dell’identità. Two early versions of brief portions of this study—worded differently, significantly shorter, and making less extensive arguments—appeared as “Miss Ellis and the Actress: For a Theatrical Reading of The Wanderer,” in A Celebration of Frances Burney, edited by Lorna Clark (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2007), and as “Teaching Evelina as a Dramatic Text,” in Teaching British Women Playwrights of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century , edited by Bonnie Nelson and Catherine Burroughs (New York: MLA Press, 2010). My debts to my family are too numerous to list, here or elsewhere, especially to loved ones who are no longer with us. The same holds for my teachers, who over the course of twenty years, from Florence to Pescara and from Viterbo to Glasgow, must have discovered to their chagrin how very difficult it is to transmit even the most consolidated knowledge if the vessel into which it is decanted is flawed. Having reached the end of a journey in which the human element has been no less important than the research, my most affectionate thoughts turn, for her lucidity, her sincere affection, and her inexhaustible capacity for communicating her passion...