Signs for the times

the long version

This book explores imaginative and creative relationships between three major areas of mid-Victorian arts: literature, painting and architecture. Through the detailed critical analysis of particular novels, prose writings, paintings and buildings, the author establishes a fusion of realistic and symbolic values that he sees as central to Victorian creative imagination. He argues that the creative achievement of the mid-nineteenth century needs to be seen far more as a whole than it has been previously, and that fundamental imaginative terms are common to art and architecture, and major theoretical writers. -- Publisher description