The dependence of Victorian novel-reviewers in general upon the vocabulary of painting

Hugh Witemeyer, Professor of English, University of New Mexico

Note 17 to Chapter 1 of the author's George Eliot and the Visual Arts, which Yale University Press published in a 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

The dependence of Victorian novel-reviewers in general upon the vocabulary of painting is amply illustrated in Richard Stang, The Theory of the Novel in England, 1850-1870 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959). Por an impressive list of the terms which William Hazlitt adapted to literary criticism from art criticism, see Roy Park, Hazlitt and the Spirit of the Age: Abstraction and Critical Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 108-09.

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Last modified 20 September 2000