Romantic Fiction Retrospective

Culture Night 2018, Hanna’s, Fermoy, Co.Cork

Romantic Fiction Retrospective emerged when a public space became available for Culture Night 2018, creating an opportunity to revisit and consolidate a series of earlier European interventions.

The retrospective brought together works that reimagined iconic female figures from literature and folklore, gently disrupting their inherited narratives. In Helsingør, Ophelia was warned that Hamlet was not “the one,” reframing her tragic trajectory from within the shadow of Ophelia’s fate in Hamlet. In Copenhagen, the Little Mermaid was encouraged to keep her voice and dignity, countering the silencing at the heart of The Little Mermaid.

Through subtle textual and visual gestures, the project sought to interrupt romantic fatalism and question the cultural endurance of self-sacrificing female archetypes.

The initiative was subsequently expanded by other curators, who carried the project forward to Germany, Lithuania, Paris, and Portugal, allowing the work to evolve across different cultural contexts while retaining its core feminist inquiry.

Funded by Cork County Council