The Edinburgh Companion to the Eighteenth-Century British Novel and the Arts, ed. Jakub Lipski and M-C. Newbould, forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press, July 2024

The eighteenth century witnessed an explosion in new literary and creative forms that rapidly expanded, and the relations between which became more complex. This has typically been described as a period that ushered in the novel form. The malleability of the concept of the novel genre and its history opens up intriguing possibilities for its role within wider eighteenth-century culture. The interaction of the so-called sister arts has frequently provided an object of critical fascination, in this period and beyond. The relationship between word and image, often summarised in the Horatian dictum ut pictura poesis, provided one significant strut of debates surrounding the sister arts, which also embraced architecture, music, landscape gardening, and sculpture. This Companion is concerned with how the fertile conversations that different art forms enjoyed in this period intersected fruitfully with the emergent shapes of prose fiction that we might collectively group under the term “novel”. Broader aesthetic concerns sit alongside studies of particular genres and artistic modes. The book trade and the shape of the printed book also play their role, as do discussions of the sociable interactions between and networks formed by artists and writers. Other essays develop the notion of interaction between art-forms by engaging with the new ways of understanding these relationships opened up by digitisation and contemporary theoretical models. The chapters comprising this Companion range from the important overview to the niche study, providing readers with a unique opportunity to navigate a vast and sprawling terrain through engaging scholarly insights.

Contents

Part I: Styles and discourses

1. Invisibility and Narration in Haywood (and Behn and Fielding), Marcie Frank

2. Orientalism and Sexuality in the Eighteenth-Century Novel, James Watt

3. Crafting the Past: Antiquarianism, Decorative Handicrafts and the Novel at the Mid-Century, Katharina Boehm

4. Anatomy, Invasion, and Imagination: Reading Gender, Medicine and the Body in the Mid-Century Nove, Ashleigh Blackwood

Part II: Visual cultures

5. Before & After: Imagining Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century British Art and Literature, from Defoe and Hogarth to Sterne and Gainsborough, Frédéric Ogée

6. The Art of Architecture and the Form of the Novel, Chris Ewers

7. ‘The statue cannot be formed, unless our inclination concur thereto’: Statuary and Sculpture in the Eighteenth-Century Novel, M-C. Newbould

8. Depicting Beautiful Women in the Eighteenth-Century Nove, Katherine Aske

9. Stories behind Pictures: Reconstructing a Pre-History of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otrant, Jakub Lipski

10. The Romances of Ann Radcliffe and the ‘Total Work of Art’, Hannah Moss

Part III: Modes and spaces of performance

11. Haywood’s Whimsical Adventures: The Novel and the Rococo, Joseph Drury

12. Song in the Novels of Samuel Richardson, Elizabeth Kraft

13. Vexed Diversions: Gulliver’s Travels, the Arts and Popular Entertainment, Daniel Cook

14. Songs, Stories and Sentimentalism: The British Broadside Ballad as Sentimental Fiction, Georgina Bartlett

15. ‘Novel Romance makes me puke!’: Burneys, Shakespeares and the Sentimental Plot, Mascha Hansen

16. Polite Arts/The Arts of Politeness: Manners, Hypocrisy and the Performance of the Self, Przemysław Uściński

17. Musical ‘Epiphanies’ in the late Eighteenth-Century Novel, Pierre Dubois

18. Jane Austen’s Art of Elocution: Discerning Feeling in Persuasion, Fraser Easton

Part IV: Networks and interactions

19. Multimedia Coterie Romance, Natasha Simonova

20. The Art of Reading and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: The Case of The History of Charlotte Summers, The Parish Girl, Joanna Maciulewicz

21. The Eighteenth-Century Novel and the Sociable Arts, Emrys Jones

22. Novels, Paintings and the Half-Trained Eye in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Reading Culture, Paul Goring

Part V: Adaptations and Afterlives

23. From Visual to Material Culture: The Afterlives of Frontispieces to Robinson Crusoe, Nathalie Collé

24. Text Transformed into Silkwork: British Needlework Pictures and the Adaptation of ‘Charlotte at the Tomb of Werter’, Sandro Jung

25. Extra-Illustration and the Seduction of a ‘Standard’ Text: James Comerford’s Erotic Books, Helen Williams

26. Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Art of Graphic Satire, from Character to Constellation, Brigitte Friant-Kessler

27. Contemporary Art and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, Amelia Dale

28. Invoking the Implied Viewer in the Eighteenth-Century Novel on Film, Jennifer Preston Wilson