What, if any, is the relationship between Charles Dickens, and the decorative arts? Between Henry James and Art Nouveau? Between the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and the paintings of the Impressionists?

Recent trends in scholarship have begun to reassess the assumption that the arts of painting and literature are too fundamentally disparate to permit a fruitful comparison between the two. In Victorian Contexts, Murray Roston puts that assumption to rest once and for all, with imaginative and refreshing essays on the similarities and shared themes of the literature, paintings, architecture, and crafts of the nineteenth century.

Explaining the value of such an intertextual approach, he argues that in every generation there is "a central complex of inherited assumptions and urgent contemporary concerns to which each creative artist responds in his or her individual way."