Private Interests

This ambitious interdisciplinary study undertakes a new definition of the eighteenth-century novel's investment in vision & visual culture, tracing the relationship between the development of the novel & that of the equally contentious genre of the portrait, particularly as represented in the novel itself. Working with the novels of Richardson, Fielding, Haywood, Manley, Sterne, Wollstonecraft & Inchbald, & the portraits of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Highmore, Hudson, Hogarth & others. Private Interests points to the intimate connections between the literary works & the paintings. Arguing that the novel's representation of the portrait sustains a tension between competing definitions of private interests. Conway shows how private interests are figured as simultaneously decorous & illicit in the novel, with the portrait at once an instrument of propriety & of scandal. Examining women's roles as both authors of & characters in the novel & the novel's encounters with the portrait, the author provides a new definition of private interests, one which highlights the development of women's agency as both spectacles & spectators.

Alison Conway is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario.