Linda M. Shires Perspectives: Modes of Viewing and Knowing in Nineteenth-Century England. Ohio State University Press, 2009. Could Victorian England be the very source of modernism? Linda M. Shires, professor of English at Stern College, provides a multi-generic approach to this fertile intellectual period and shows how its painting and photography, and its artists’ innovative techniques, educated audiences into new ways of understanding visual and literary output. The result?  George Elliot, Robert Browning, and other shining lights are covered in deeper dimension. Among the reviewers John Maynard, NYU professor of English, writes, “Shires’s expositions provide an excellent road map for how to expand this practice to other works of the period, indeed of other periods as well.” Perspectives is an important contribution to scholarship on the Victorian era.