The world in paint : modern art and visuality in England, 1848-1914

Paintings of a "kept woman" sitting in her lover's lap, of the Lady of Shalott, of Merlin the magician, of an explosive, abstract pattern-some rendered in meticulous detail, others only sketched-appear side by side in David Peters Corbett's book on English art.

The sharp differences in style and in subject matter are striking and significant, but they are not presented in any of the usual ways.

They are not seen as markers of a progressive development, expressions of strong personalities, or signs of English artists' inability or reluctance to master French Impressionism.All these familiar narratives are abandoned in Corbett's book, which, in their stead, proposes a new way of looking at English painting from the Pre-Raphaelites to Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists.

An award-winning art historian, Corbett contends that from 1848 to 1914, English artists confronted a world in which the rise of science and decline in religion deprived painting of many of its traditional functions and powers.

Yet these same changes, according to Corbett, presented the possibility that painting could become a crucial means of mediating the widely decried materialism of industrial society.