The Pre-Raphaelite Body

The avant garde is designed to shock and the Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetes shocked their contemporaries by their representation of the human body. This interdisciplinary study shows how the critical reaction to the representation of the body in painting and poetry from the work of Millais to that of Rossetti, and from Morris to Burne-Jones, was conditioned by such late nineteenth-century anxieties as fear of cholera and hatred of Catholicism, fascination with the fallen woman, horror at the `shrieking sisterhood' of emancipated women, and even the terror of psycho-sexual diseases.