Stuart Sillars is Professor of English at the Universities of Bergen and Agder, Norway. He has written extensively on literature and the visual arts, and his most recent books are Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic, 1720-1820 (2006) and The Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709-1875 (2008), both published by Cambridge University Press. Earlier books have explored visual and literary art in the two world wars, illustration and the Victorian novel and the special forms of irony involved in English writing of the early twentieth century.