Private interests : women, portraiture, and the visual culture of the English novel, 1709-1791 / Alison Conway.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This study undertakes a new definition of the 18th-century novel's investment in visual culture, tracing the relationship between the development of the novel and that of the portrait, particularly as represented in the novel itself.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Relating 18th-century literature to the visual arts is not new. Jean Hagstrum's important The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (1958) did a fine job with poetry and the arts, and recently Steven Gores provided an interesting study of the miniature as visual image in Henry Fielding's Amelia in an otherwise disappointing Psychosocial Spaces: Verbal and Visual Readings of British Culture, 1750-1820 (CH, Jul'00). Conway (Univ. of Western Ontario) discusses the parallel evolution of the 18th-century novel and portrait painting in terms of women's relation to private interests. Although the basic thesis of a synergy of visual and literary cultures is perhaps overstated, Conway's scholarly integration of feminist and other criticism into her close readings of novels by Fielding, Manley, Sterne, Wollstonecraft, and Inchbald is well done, and her chapter on Clarissa is particularly good. A rather specialized work, recommended for graduate students and researchers. H. Benoist Our Lady of the Lake University of San Antonio