How "modern" is the art made in England between 1860 and 1914?

England in this period was a highly modernized society, but the art it produced is not "modernist" in the sense that the word has been used to describe French art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book seeks to break the association of "modern" art in England with French models and to describe anew the relationship between English art, England's artists, and their modern culture.

The collection presents in a single volume an introduction to the variety and depth of current innovative work on English art. Through a series of essays by leading scholars, dealing with themes including the new professionalism in art, the gendered nature of institutions, the rise of Aestheticism, and the fragmentation of the art world, the book brings into focus this crucial and fascinating period by offering a series of openings for a new map of modern art in England. By identifying an array of responses to modern life and experience, the essays inaugurate a revisionist view of the period and reveal that modern English artists and art were profoundly involved with questions about the relationship between artistic tradition and the circumstances and subjects of modern life and modern art practice.

Contributors include Paul Barlow, Tim Barringer, Jane Beckett, Pamela Fletcher, Alicia Foster, Kenneth McConkey, Elizabeth Prettejohn, Andrew Stephenson, Lisa Tickner, and Janet Wolff.