ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the uses of pictorial parallels in the early attempts at theorizing and historicizing eighteenth-century fiction. It opens with a discussion of the meta-pictorial practices of novelists themselves, including the best-known cases of Fielding, Sterne, and Radcliffe, and then proceeds to scrutinize the role of discursive pictorialism in the early literary-historical material, focusing on An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr. Fielding (1751), most likely by Francis Coventry, Clara Reeve’s The Progress of Romance (1785), as well as the dispersed critical and literary-historical writings of Walter Scott. This chapter evaluates the extent to which the pictorial parallel helped delineate the new genre as well as serving as a tool of differentiation between the diverse modes of fiction writing in the period. By analysing material that ranges from metaphorical pictorialism to references to specific artists and artworks, this chapter reconstructs what might be termed the visual architext for the development of eighteenth-century fiction.
