Introduction

Abstract

Brown uses the introduction to situate the book within studies of nineteenth-century British literary realism, painting, photography, visual culture, and image–text relationships. He establishes that the mid-nineteenth century marked the first time critics and writers used the term ‘realism’ to describe literature or painting, and that even though we now tend to accept a ready definition of realism, its meaning was ambiguous at its inception. He argues that writers and critics came to define and understand realism by writing about painting and painters, and by defining realism and its possibilities, they established beliefs about the people who both practiced and were the subjects of realist representation in terms of race, gender, and class.