Contemporary Art and the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Conceptually oriented art has a history of adapting eighteenth-century fiction. Contemporary gallery art has regularly repurposed and translated eighteenth-century writing across media; and, by moving from one medium to another, it illuminates, under strange light, certain elements and structures of the eighteenth-century novel. I will not provide an exhaustive catalogue of appearances of eighteenth-century novels within contemporary visual art; instead, I will closely examine how three prominent contemporary visual artists rework eighteenth-century fiction, namely John Baldessari, Meg Cranston and Paul Chan. All three artists are concerned with translating aspects of the reading experience across media.

John Baldessari’s lithograph series and...