Far-ranging and deeply researched, Painting the Novel is an essential read for eighteenth-century scholars and a must for word and image students.
Professor Peter de Voogd, University of Utrecht
The debate between realism and the ideal had been an ongoing debate in art criticism long before it entered performance and criticism in narrative fiction. Jakub Lipskis excellent book surveys this encounter between painting and prose fiction as it played out in British fiction of the eighteenth century from Defoe to Sterne, from Fielding to Radcliffe, from more or less attempts to capture "real life" in the presentation of character to ideal figures of beauty such as Sophia Western, from the real world of Smolletts tavern scenes to the idealised illustrations of Burneys Evelina, and finally to the mixture of ideally sentimentalised characters with the often grotesque landscape of the Gothic. If Hogarth and Guido Reni do not quite bookend the discussion, they play important roles. Lipskis book appears at a time when descriptive moments in works of fictionmoments outside the flow of narrativeare drawing ever greater critical attention. His work makes an important contribution to that discussion.
Professor Maximillian E. Novak, University of California
In this admirably broad and wide-ranging study Jakub Lipski sheds new light on the relationship between the novel and the visual arts, especially painting, in the eighteenth century. Moving beyond the familiar accounts of the sisters arts he carefully elucidates a deeper engagement, demonstrating that novelists frequently evoked the pictorial to work through and better understand their own practice in a period of generic instability and turmoil. Through a series of compelling case studies, illuminated by welcome attention to paratextual features alongside painterly motifs and explicit references, the complexity of the entanglement between the verbal and the visual in the eighteenth century is brought intelligently and vividly to life.
Professor Joe Bray, University of Sheffield