ASense of Shock

What does modern British and Irish literature have to do with French impressionist painting? And what does Henry James have to do with the legal dispute between John Ruskin and J.M.W. Whistler? What links Walter Pater with Conrad''s portrait of a genocidal maniac in Heart of Darkness? Or George Moore with Irish nationalism, Virginia Woolf with modern distraction, and Ford Madox Ford with the Great...