"Pre-Raphaelite art is par excellence the art of mid-Victorian Britain, and this reappraisal fills an important void within available scholarship on the subject. By adopting a thematic approach, Tim Barringer navigates a course from analysis of key pictures to their significance within the complex cultural and social matrix of Victorian Britain. Individual chapters provide core concepts for understanding the Pre-Raphaelite engagement with medieval revivalism, nature worship, issues of class and gender, and the reconciliation of the religious image and realism in the nineteenth century; these chapters are also enlivened by telling biographical information where it is significant for the meaning of an image."--BOOK JACKET.