Bloomsbury Group
The Bloomsbury Group was a circle of influential writers, intellectuals, and artists in London during the early 20th century. Known for their unconventional lifestyles and progressive ideas, the group included figures such as Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynes. They were known for their impact on literature, art, and social thought, and their legacy continues to influence modern culture.
6 Key excerpts on "Bloomsbury Group"
eBook - ePubRadio Modernism
Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938
- Todd Avery(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter Two Common Talkers: The Bloomsbury Group and the Aestheticist Ethics of Broadcasting Turn on the wireless. . . . There you will be able to consult the findings of the public psychometer for yourself. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938) Formed early in the Edwardian Era and named after the West Central London district in which many of its members lived, the Bloomsbury Group was a remarkable and influential constellation of early twentieth-century British cultural figures composed of ten core members: two art critics (Clive Bell and Roger Fry) and, with Fry, who coined the term, an equal number of innovative post-impressionist painters (Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant); a renowned economist (John Maynard Keynes); one of the most prominent literary journalists of the first half of the century (Desmond MacCarthy); a trailblazing biographer (Lytton Strachey); three fiction writers (E.M. Forster, Leonard Woolf, and Virginia Woolf); and, in the Woolfs, two of the century's great social and political theorists. He, after serving as a colonial administrator in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), became a socialist, an outspoken critic of imperialism, and an architect of the League of Nations; while she was the central English-language feminist theorist of her time and arguably of the twentieth century. Bloomsbury was, in the words of one wit, a circle composed of (sexual) triangles who lived in squares (Bedford, Fitzroy, Russell). "Bloomsbury" was also, as the radio historian Kate Whitehead argues, perhaps a misleading moniker for a group of cultural figures who spent a lot of time at the BBC ("Broadcasting" 121). It has long been a critical tendency—in R.G...
eBook - ePub- Francis Mulhern(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Such liberalization and modernization were of course quite general tendencies, in changing social circumstances and especially after the shocks of the 1914–18 war and, later, the loss of Empire. It is not that the Bloomsbury Group caused either change; it is only (but it is something) that they were prominent and relatively coherent among its early representatives and agents. At the same time, the liberalization and modernization were more strictly adaptations than basic changes in the class, which in its function of directing the central ruling-class institutions has, for all the changes of manners and after some evident recruitment of others into its modes, not only persisted, but more successfully persisted because these adaptations have been made and continue to be made. The contribution of Bloomsbury What has then finally to be discussed is the character of Bloomsbury’s cultural, intellectual and artistic contributions within this context of their specific sociological formation and their historical significance. Yet any such discussion faces severe theoretical and methodological difficulties. There can be no question of reducing a number of highly specific individual contributions to some crude general content. Cultural groups of this kind – fractions by association rather than fractions or oppositional groups by manifesto or programme – can in any case never be treated in this way. Yet neither can the contributions be seen in mere random association. It is in this careful mood that we have to read Leonard Woolf’s interesting summary: There have often been groups of people, writers and artists, who were not only friends, but were consciously united by a common doctrine and object, or purpose artistic or social. The utilitarians, the Lake poets, the French impressionists, the English Pre-Raphaelites were groups of this kind. Our group was quite different. Its basis was friendship, which in some cases deepened into love and marriage...
eBook - ePub- Paul Roazen(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...3 Notes on Leonard and Virginia Woolf Even though Virginia Woolf has been long established as a central figure in the early twentieth-century flowering of the British intelligentsia known as the Bloomsbury Group, I only came to her work by a circuitous route. The first member of that set that I read was John Maynard Keynes; when a paperback edition combining his Essays in Biography and Two Memoirs first attracted me in 1959 it was partly because Keynes was such a central figure in modern economics. I can still recall how scintillating I found his “My Early Beliefs.” And Keynes seemed as breathtaking a writer when talking about Robert Malthus, Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, the mysterious Dr. Melchior, Trotsky, the makers of the Versailles Treaty, or Newton. It was only at Oxford, during my next year of graduate study, that I had the leisure actually to read Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936); by that time I was well aware of Keynes’s talents as a writer as well as an economist. His The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) was an unforgettable experience, as much for its powerful sketches of the statesmen involved at the conclusion of World War I as for its prophecies of what would follow for Europe from the provisions of the peace treaty. I had initially started off to read then for a degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, and I suppose it was because of the unusual vitality of philosophy at Oxford at that time, the central place it played in the intellectual life there, that I also then read much of G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903). Moore’s argument was rather more intensive than I, as a student of political philosophy, absolutely needed to understand, but I felt I was encountering the thinker Keynes, as well as others, considered the main philosophical figure for Bloomsbury. I had already acquired my interest in Freud, none of whose books were then available at my Magdalen College library...
eBook - ePub- Whitney Davis(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Making History: The Bloomsbury Group's Construction of Aesthetic and Sexual Identity Christopher Reed, PhD University of Southern Maine Christopher Reed is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Southern Maine. Correspondence may be addressed: Art Department, University of Southern Maine, Gorham, ME 04038. [Haworth co-indexing entry note]: “Making History: The Bloomsbury Group’s Construction of Aesthetic and Sexual Identity/’ Reed, Christopher. Co-published simultaneously in the Journal of Homosexuality (The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 27, No. 1/2, 1994, pp. 189–224; and: Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History (ed: Whitney Davis) The Haworth Press, Inc., 1994, pp. 189–224. Multiple copies of this article/chapter may be purchased from The Haworth Document Delivery Center [1–800–3-HAWORTH; 9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m. (EST)]. DOI: 10.4324/9781315876825-9 SUMMARY. This essay examines the way England’s well-known Bloomsbury Group in the first decades of this century negotiated the legacy of prominent figures of the generation before in order to create its own identity. Looking at the group’s ideas about both aesthetics and sexuality, the author shows how the group privileged Leo Tolstoy over J. A. M. Whistler, and Oscar Wilde over Walter Pater. The introduction and conclusion seek to set this study in the context of current issues in gay and lesbian studies. More than a century after the emergence of the modem homosexual identity (as described by Foucault), a strenuous debate surrounds its suitability as the basis for an academic discipline. 1 As the first colleges and universities tentatively inaugurate “centers” and “programs” in “gay and lesbian studies” or “gender studies,” critics-both well-meaning and not-have questioned the intellectual viability of the field in relation to traditional academic departments...
eBook - ePubThe English Novel
An Introduction
- Terry Eagleton(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...It was that of the dissident sons and daughters of the governing class – those who knew that class from the inside, and shared its privileges, but who formed a kind of nonconformist fraction within it. Whereas the ‘official’ ruling class concerns itself with rank, custom, stability, continuity, public spirit and pragmatic knowledge, these internal émigrés are more drawn to privacy, transgression, timeless intensities, sexual experiment, personal relations, subjective states of mind and ‘metaphysical’ broodings. Women like Woolf and male homosexuals like Forster bulk large in their ranks, as those sidelined because of their gender join forces with the ‘unmanned’ sons of the virile patriarchs. These, then, are the ‘free spirits’, who still share many of the assumptions of their social background, but who are in revolt against its arrogance and philistinism. They are artists, bohemians, free thinkers, sexual liberationists, spiritual anarchists – and they bring to this nonconformism all the sang froid and self-assurance of their patrician backgrounds. The bohemian may be careless of social convention, but so also is the aristocrat. Those at the apex of society can afford to flout its rules just like those in its margins. There is an unspoken compact between the rebel and the ruler, and Bloomsbury was both at once. It is a complicity we can observe in Woolf’s early novel Night and Day, in which Katherine Hilbery breaks free of a conventional upper-class background with her disreputable lover Ralph Denham, only to discover that the upper-class coterie to which she belongs is adaptable enough to clasp them both forgivingly to its bosom. Such men and women also bring to their rebellion an instinctive elitism. It is just that the elite has now been transposed from the generals and merchant bankers to the aesthetes and iconoclasts. The Bloomsbury Group to which Woolf belonged was a coterie which saw itself as a vanguard...
eBook - ePub- Rachel Bowlby(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The ‘reasonable anti-Bloomsbury view’ came to seem, as I thought about it, both redundant and too easy. Too easy, because the mandatory objections, the appeals to alternative centres of value in the common people, or in a Tolstoyan ethic, or in the Dark Gods, have already been forcefully made; little would be gained by repeating or diluting them. Redundant, because time, social change and full documentation have put Bloomsbury beyond any simple polemic; the impulse to strike and declare a balance between the enviable and the pitiable, the fruitful and the sterile, the profound and the trivial in those lives, works and activities yields now to a dominant sense of their distance and singularity in relation to our own world. Moreover, I judged – as I reread some of Virginia Woolf’s novels and looked over the recent critical writing about her – that for a group particularly interested in Woolf, the fruitfully provocative challenge lay elsewhere, in the quite wide discrepancy between the implications of the best of the recent studies and the wary or downright dismissive assessments that embody representative English opinion. 1 Much information, tending to clear up misunderstandings and to scotch error about Virginia Woolf, has come to hand in recent years – A Writer’s Diary (1953) and Professor Bell’s biography (1972) are the obvious landmarks. Comprehensive studies such as Professor Guiguet’s, and special enquiries such as Professor Rosenbaum’s into the influence of Moore, and Dr McLaurin’s into repetition and rhythm, establish particular areas of clarity and perspective. 2 Later writers, critics and philosophers – specifically Beckett, Robbe-Grillet and Merleau-Ponty – in modifying our sensibilities, criteria and expectations, have altered our sense of what is significant in the recent past. This combination of scholarly work, critical thought and historical circumstance necessitates a revaluation of Virginia Woolf’s novels and of her place in English literature...
