ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book shows that Ann Radcliffe's inter-artistic project was preceded by a long tradition of multifaceted entanglement of the sister arts of painting and the novel. It identifies an aesthetic tension between the arguably idealist precept to "draw from nature though not from life", echoing Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses, and the actual uses of pictorialism in the narrative – as a rule, dependent on the carnivalesque and the grotesque. The book offers a relatively wide selection of material in order to show the various forms of the transtextual dependence of text on image. It argues that only a sufficiently broad perspective can help reconstruct at least some of the elements making up the broad canvas of the novel's engagement with the visual arts.
