The eighteenth-century novelists’ quest for verisimilitude, which is indissolubly connected with their attempts at having the novel acknowledged as a canonical genre, may also account for their different attitudes towards description as a means of representation. Thus, throughout the century, in the context of the transition from “outer” to “inner” verisimilitude, the novel has witnessed the gradual shift from the radical rejection of description, causing scarcity/absence of visual detail and supported by the writers’ confidence in the power of the word, to its rehabilitation and reinvestment with symbolical functions. The paper aims at tracing the change in the treatment of this site of focalization in some of the most representative novels of the eighteenth century, with special reference to two of its peculiar manifestations, i.e. character drawing and setting descriptions.
