Formal Invitations: Techniques of Interpolation in Visual and Verbal Art, 1760-1880 argues that nineteenth-century literature and visual art share a common investment in audience immersion. Beginning from the hypothesis that various representational techniques in prose and painting (in function, if not form) mirror one another, this project identifies and deconstructs these techniques, grouping them by their functions of identification, recognition, collaboration, and immersion. The innovative formal techniques I identify¬¬– such as free indirect discourse and direct address in the novel, and the Rückenfigur and multiperspectivalism in painting–trouble the boundary between subject and object, audience and artwork. Juxtaposing novels such as Tristram Shandy, Emma, Jane Eyre, and Middlemarch with visual artifacts such as William Hogarth’s prints, John Constable’s six-footer landscapes, Pre-Raphaelite narrative paintings, and the panorama, my chapters probe the period’s formal devices and their peculiar capacity both to absorb the audience and invite interactivity. From the first chapter, which shows how free indirect discourse and the Rückenfigur device open a space for the audience to identify with characters, to the final chapter that explores how the panorama and Middlemarch spatially surround and rhetorically assimilate the audience, I ground the genesis of this desire for immersion in the Victorian era. The techniques of immersion I analyse were developed over a lengthy period, reaching, like the novel, a level of sophisticated self-referentiality and refined articulation during the core of the nineteenth century. This evolution continues beyond the nineteenth century, however, and in its broadest ambitions, my project sketches a genealogy of techniques of immersion that culminates in technologies such as interactive gaming and virtual reality.