The difference between victorian painting and modernism i that: the object of victorian paint is the representation of reality without sensation, while impressionism painting wants underline the quality of sensations and not only the reality of scene.

the difference is visible also in modernism narrative tecniques indeed James Joyce(the writer of dubliners, that is a modernism collection of stories) uses symbolic realism where the represented elements want to remaind a different concept, for exemple in the dead from dubliners epiphany rapresents the revvelation of truth to the inhabitans of miserable life, therefore people and readers can understand how to leave their situation in dublin, and facing a change is difficult, it follows that (the dead) is cinsidered as a fatal of human beings and there is no a salvation(the same concept is described also in italian verism with fatalism of Giovanni Verga). In XIX centuty Giacomo Leopardi gives a possibility to humanity, the possibilite of denunce injuries of life.