New Perspectives on the Burney Family

This special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life aspires to place Frances Burney and her writings firmly within the context of the Burney family, which she saw as intrinsic to the exercise of her own creativity. Studying the Burneys can provoke questions such as Does the “literary family,” as a phenomenon, emerge much earlier than the 1790s? Does the “literary” overlap in meaningful ways with other disciplines, bringing fresh impetus to Jon Klancher’s work on the porousness of disciplinary categories during the eighteenth century? The included essays reveal archival discoveries, draw upon recently published biographical material, and use new methodologies to reinscribe the contours of the Burney family’s internal dynamics and sociable coteries. Individual articles will be of interest to those working on kinship, sociability, literature and science, women’s writing, celebrity, professionalism, print culture, global approaches, and biographical approaches to eighteenth-century literature. 

Contributors: Lorna Clark, Stewart Cooke, Sophie Coulombeau, Amy Louise Erickson, Mascha Hansen, Anthony Mandal, Peter Sabor, Ruth Scobie, Cassandra Ulph