Francesca Frigerio

Universita' di Milano

The Figure in the Portrait. An Interdisciplinary Recognition 1850-1915.

2004-2005

Francesca Frigerio graduated summa cum laude in Foreign Languages and Literatures (English and French) at the University of Milan, with a thesis entitled "Modernism and urban culture: London in Dorothy Richardson's novels". In 2004 she has received her PhD in English Literature from the University of Milan, with a dissertation centered on the role of music - both as a theme and as an aesthetic model - in Dorothy Richardson and Rebecca West's novels. While going on investigating the relationship between urban culture and women's writing (she is currently member of the editorial board of the "Literary London Journal"), she is now working on a project focused on the cultural history of the portrait, as it unfolds in England in the second half of the Nineteenth century. She has most recently published both on Rebecca West ("Under West(ern) Eyes: Rebecca West Reads Joyce", Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. XXVI, No.1, Fall 2002; "Music and the Feminine Aesthetics of Detail in Rebecca West's Harriet Hume", in Rebecca West Today: Contemporary Critical Approaches, edited by Bernard Schweizer, Palgrave, forthcoming) and on Dorothy Richardson (Musical Aesthetics and Narrative Forms in Dorothy Richardson's prose, Textus, Textus, XVI, No.1, 2003; "'A Filmless London': Flânerie and Urban Culture in Dorothy Richardson's Articles for Close Up", in The Swarming Streets: Twentieth-Century Literary Representations of London. Selected Essays from the 2002 Literary London Conference: Representations of London in Literature, (Rodopi Press, November 2004).