This collection of essays by leading scholars in Burney studies provides an innovative, interdisciplinary critical consideration of the relationship of one of the major authors of the long English Romantic period with the arts. The encounter was not devoid of tensions and indeed often required a degree of wrangling on Burney’s part. This was a revealing and at times contentious dialogue, allowing us to reconstruct in an original and highly focused way the feminine negotiation with such key concepts of the late Enlightenment and Romanticism as virtue, reputation, creativity, originality, artistic expression, and self-construction. While there is now a flourishing body of work on Frances Burney and, more broadly, Romantic women authors, this book concentrates for the first time on the rich artistic and material context that surrounded, supported, and shaped Frances Burney’s oeuvre.
"Ranging across a variety of topics and cultural objects ... this collection provides a welcome addition to Burney scholarship and to the material studies turn. ... On their own, each of these essays makes a fine contribution to the thriving discipline of Burney studies; taken together, they do more-asking that we rethink the category of art ... . a welcome reorientation toward a study of the arts, broadly construed, and the collective ways in which scholars might study them." (Katarina O'Briain, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 35 (3), 2023)