The Edinburgh Companion to Eighteenth-Century British Prose Fiction and the Arts, ed. Jakub Lipski and M-C. Newbould, under contract with Edinburgh University Press for publication in 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.

Provisional contents

Part 1: Styles and discourses

• Joseph Drury, ‘The Whimsical Eighteenth Century: Eliza Haywood’s Rococo Fictions’
• James Watt, ‘Orientalism and the Eighteenth-Century Novel’
• Katherina Boehm, ‘Crafting the Past: Antiquarianism and the Eighteenth-Century Novel’
• Sebastian Domsch, ‘The Picturesque in 18th-Century Criticism of Novels’
• Jakub Lipski, ‘The Pictorial Parallel and the Early Histories of Eighteenth-Century Fiction’

Part 2: Visual cultures

• Frédéric Ogée, ‘Identity and Self in Eighteenth-Century English Novels and Art’
• M-C. Newbould, ‘“The statue cannot be formed, unless our inclination concur thereto”: Statuary and Sculpture in the Imaginary of the Eighteenth-Century Novel’
• Katherine Aske, ‘“The very foundation of all her excellencies”: Describing Beautiful Women in the Eighteenth-Century Novel’
• Nathalie Collé, ‘From Visual to Material Culture: The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Frontispieces to Novels’
• Sandro Jung, ‘H. F. Gravelot and Rococo Book Illustration in England: His Plates for Pamela or Virtue Rewarded and Histoire de Tom Jones‘
• Helen Williams, ‘Erotic Arts and the Eighteenth-Century Novel’
• Ashleigh Blackwood, ‘Intimacy, Invasion, and Images: Reading Gender, Medicine, and the Body in the Mid-Century Novel’
• Chris Ewers, ‘Architecture and the eighteenth-century novel’
• Hannah Moss, ‘Ann Radcliffe and the total work of art’

Part 3: Modes and spaces of performance

• Marcie Frank, ‘Invisibility and Narration in Haywood (and Behn and Fielding)’
• Daniel Cook, ‘Gulliver and the Arts’
• Elizabeth Kraft, ‘Poetry, Song, and the Shape of the Novel: The Novels of Samuel Richardson’
• Przemysław Uściński, ‘The Arts of Politeness: Manners, Gender and the Performance of the Self’
• Pierre Dubois, ‘Musical Epiphany: The Heroine as Silent Listener’
• Mascha Hansen, ‘“Silent Modesty”: Burneys, Shakespeares, and Sentimental Plot Lines’
• Fraser Easton, ‘Jane Austen’s Art of Elocution: From Sentimentality to Free Indirect Discourse’
• Georgina Bartlett, ‘Streets, Stories, and Songs: The British Broadside Ballad as Fiction and Theatre’

Part 4: Networks and interactions

• Claire Wilkinson, ‘Speculation, Infatuation, and Fictitious Value: The Art of Investment in Eliza Haywood’s Early Novels’
• Natasha Simonova, ‘Multimedia Coterie Romance’
• Joanna Maciulewicz, ‘Reading as Art’
• Paul Goring, ‘Sterne and Italian Painting in 1760s Britain’
• Emrys Jones, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Novel and the Sociable Arts’

Part 5: Adaptations

• Amelia Dale, ‘Contemporary Art and the Eighteenth-Century Novel’
• Jennifer Wilson, ‘Invoking the Implied Viewer in the Eighteenth-Century Novel on Film’
• Brigitte Friant Kessler, ‘Graphic Satire to Graphic Novel’