ABSTRACT
The critical tradition of writing about the eighteenth-century novel has already reached a point where it becomes an object of interest in itself – in the form of meta-critical studies. The critical interest in inter-artistic, or inter-medial, perspectives in eighteenth-century studies has a relatively long history. The so-called sister arts theory was one of the dominant fields of investigation among ancient thinkers, who formulated some of the most prevailing slogans addressing the affinities between the visual and the verbal. The position of painting was most successfully vindicated in the times of William Hogarth and Sir Joshua Reynolds – the two celebrity-painters, reformers of the visual arts and founders of the "British school of painting". The early self-reflexive discourse did not as a rule display any profound theoretical insight. The intertextual gestures in the self-reflexive fictional discourse were of a versatile nature. It happened that some texts were written as a direct response to a predecessor or predecessors.
