This is the project website for ‘Interartistic contexts for the development of the early English novel’, a research project funded by an Opus grant awarded by the National Science Centre, Poland.

This project is led by Jakub Lipski (Kazimierz Wielki University, Bydgoszcz) with team members Joanna Maciulewicz and Mary Newbould.

We’re exploring the diversity of the eighteenth-century novel – a hybrid form and concept in this period – and the interartistic contexts of the genre’s emergence. This includes its connections with art forms as diverse as painting, book illustration, sculpture, and landscape gardening. It also involves an elastic approach to ‘the arts’ that involves the arts of rhetoric, reading, sociability, and more.

One focus of the project is novelist Tobias Smollett and his works’ appeal to and relations with the visual arts.

The Eighteenth-Century Novel and the Arts involves a wide range of print publications, academic activities, and research initiatives. Find out more on these pages.

_{^{The ‘Interartistic contexts for the development of the early English novel’ project grant is registered by NCN as 2020/37/B/HS2/02093), 2021-2024.}}