Pre-Raphaelitism was a multi-faceted movement which had a fundamental impact on the cultural, artistic, and intellectual life of Victorian Britain and the British Empire. The Pre-Raphaelites were legendary figures mythologized in their own lifetimes. This major movement has direct relevance to contemporary understanding of national heritage. The Pre-Raphaelites and their supporters produced numerous cultural statements spanning the decorative arts, literature and social politics. This four volume set demonstrates the profoundly interdisciplinary nature of Pre-Raphaelitism. It collects together original Pre-Raphaelite materials comprising fiction, prose, verse, literary criticism and illustration. A range of writings on art, design, architecture, philosophy, religion, science and politics is presented in the themed volumes: literature and literary criticism; autobiographies and diaries; philosophy; design and art criticism; social and cultural critique. Whole texts and significant extracts from the writings of key Pre-Raphaelite figures such as William Allingham, Walter Crane, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, William Morris, Walter Pater, Coventry Patmore, George du Maurie

In her systematic reassessment of the remaking of the Arthurian past in nineteenth-century British fiction and non-fiction, Inga Bryden examines the Victorian Arthurian revival as a cultural phenomenon, offering insights into the relationship between social, cultural, religious, and ethnographic debates of the period and a wide range of texts. Throughout, she adopts an intertextual and historical perspective, informed by poststructuralist thinking, to reveal nineteenth-century attitudes towards the past. Starting with a review of the historical evidence available to Victorian writers and an examination of how historians of the time represented Arthur, the author connects Victorian accounts of Arthur's quest to contemporary scientific and historical searches for origins and knowledge, and to his appropriation by competing religious movements. She shows how writers explored the dynamics of heroism by recruiting Arthur and his knights to define codes of chivalric service, and to personify the psychological complexities of love. Finally, the legend of his death and transportation to Avalon is deconstructed and placed in the context of cultural attitudes towards commemorating the dead and theological debates about the afterlife. Inga Bryden engages not only with well-known Arthurian texts by Tennyson, Swinburne, Morris and Rossetti, but with lesser-known works by Bulwer-Lytton, Robert Stephen Hawker, Sebastian Evans, Diana Maria Mulock, Christiana Douglas and Joseph Shorthouse.