Ruth Livesey
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197263983
- eISBN:
- 9780191734731
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197263983.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter examines the afterlife of 1880s socialism in the early modernist generation. It focuses upon Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry and examines their negotiations with the productive, engaged ...
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This chapter examines the afterlife of 1880s socialism in the early modernist generation. It focuses upon Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry and examines their negotiations with the productive, engaged aesthetics of those Bloomsbury socialists before the Bloomsbury Group. Both Woolf and Fry had significant relations with writers examined in earlier chapters of this work. Woolf's writings concerning the Women's Co-operative Guild reflect her rejection of the socially engaged and productive aesthetics of that generation in favour of a radical statement of aesthetic autonomy and the individualism of the artist. Meanwhile, Roger Fry's aesthetics strained between a belief in a democracy of aesthetic responsiveness and a conscious attempt to rewrite the aesthetic legacy of Ruskin and Morris. In the debacle that surrounded Wyndham Lewis's secession from Fry's collective Omega Workshops, however, Lewis himself sexed Fry's aesthetics as effeminate traces of the fin de siècle.Less
This chapter examines the afterlife of 1880s socialism in the early modernist generation. It focuses upon Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry and examines their negotiations with the productive, engaged aesthetics of those Bloomsbury socialists before the Bloomsbury Group. Both Woolf and Fry had significant relations with writers examined in earlier chapters of this work. Woolf's writings concerning the Women's Co-operative Guild reflect her rejection of the socially engaged and productive aesthetics of that generation in favour of a radical statement of aesthetic autonomy and the individualism of the artist. Meanwhile, Roger Fry's aesthetics strained between a belief in a democracy of aesthetic responsiveness and a conscious attempt to rewrite the aesthetic legacy of Ruskin and Morris. In the debacle that surrounded Wyndham Lewis's secession from Fry's collective Omega Workshops, however, Lewis himself sexed Fry's aesthetics as effeminate traces of the fin de siècle.
Jonathan Atkin
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719060700
- eISBN:
- 9781781700105
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719060700.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The Great War still haunts us. This book draws together examples of the ‘aesthetic pacifism’ practised during the Great War by such celebrated individuals as Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon and ...
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The Great War still haunts us. This book draws together examples of the ‘aesthetic pacifism’ practised during the Great War by such celebrated individuals as Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon and Bertrand Russell. It also tells the stories of those less well known who shared the attitudes of the Bloomsbury Group when it came to facing the first ‘total war’. The five-year research for this study gathered evidence from all the major archives in Great Britain and abroad in order to paint a complete picture of this unique form of anti-war expression. The narrative begins with the Great War's effect on philosopher-pacifist Bertrand Russell and Cambridge University.Less
The Great War still haunts us. This book draws together examples of the ‘aesthetic pacifism’ practised during the Great War by such celebrated individuals as Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon and Bertrand Russell. It also tells the stories of those less well known who shared the attitudes of the Bloomsbury Group when it came to facing the first ‘total war’. The five-year research for this study gathered evidence from all the major archives in Great Britain and abroad in order to paint a complete picture of this unique form of anti-war expression. The narrative begins with the Great War's effect on philosopher-pacifist Bertrand Russell and Cambridge University.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter focuses on the British modernist whose work represents the most sustained fictionalising engagement with biography. It recounts changes in biographical theory in Woolf's lifetime; ...
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This chapter focuses on the British modernist whose work represents the most sustained fictionalising engagement with biography. It recounts changes in biographical theory in Woolf's lifetime; especially her father's Dictionary of National Biography; the influence of Freud on Bloomsbury; Woolf's own critical discussions of biography; and New Criticism's antagonism to biographical interpretation; though it also draws on recent biographical criticism of Woolf. It discusses Jacob's Room and Flush, but concentrates on Orlando, arguing that it draws on the notions of imaginary and composite portraits discussed earlier. Whereas Orlando is often read as a ‘debunking’ of an obtuse biographer‐narrator, it shows how Woolf's aims are much more complex. First, the book's historical range is alert to the historical development of biography; and that the narrator is no more fixed than Orlando, but transforms with each epoch. Second, towards the ending the narrator begins to sound curiously like Lytton Strachey, himself the arch‐debunker of Victorian biographical piety. Thus Orlando is read as both example and parody of what Woolf called ‘The New Biography’. The chapter reads Woolf in parallel with Harold Nicolson's The Development of English Biography, and also his book Some People—a text whose imaginary (self)portraiture provoked her discussion of ‘The New Biography’ as well as contributing to the conception of Orlando.Less
This chapter focuses on the British modernist whose work represents the most sustained fictionalising engagement with biography. It recounts changes in biographical theory in Woolf's lifetime; especially her father's Dictionary of National Biography; the influence of Freud on Bloomsbury; Woolf's own critical discussions of biography; and New Criticism's antagonism to biographical interpretation; though it also draws on recent biographical criticism of Woolf. It discusses Jacob's Room and Flush, but concentrates on Orlando, arguing that it draws on the notions of imaginary and composite portraits discussed earlier. Whereas Orlando is often read as a ‘debunking’ of an obtuse biographer‐narrator, it shows how Woolf's aims are much more complex. First, the book's historical range is alert to the historical development of biography; and that the narrator is no more fixed than Orlando, but transforms with each epoch. Second, towards the ending the narrator begins to sound curiously like Lytton Strachey, himself the arch‐debunker of Victorian biographical piety. Thus Orlando is read as both example and parody of what Woolf called ‘The New Biography’. The chapter reads Woolf in parallel with Harold Nicolson's The Development of English Biography, and also his book Some People—a text whose imaginary (self)portraiture provoked her discussion of ‘The New Biography’ as well as contributing to the conception of Orlando.
Priya Satia
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195331417
- eISBN:
- 9780199868070
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195331417.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Early Modern History
This chapter explains why Britons were particularly drawn to the Ottoman Empire in this period and how intelligence agents' particular cultural motivations disposed them to epistemological ...
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This chapter explains why Britons were particularly drawn to the Ottoman Empire in this period and how intelligence agents' particular cultural motivations disposed them to epistemological experimentation. It describes the agents' central role in cultural production about the region, as famous explorers and authors intimate with Edwardian literary society, with whom they fashioned a new literary cult of the desert, in which the spy novel figured centrally. Many of them had gone to the Middle East looking for literary inspiration, a modernist aesthetic, romantic adventure, and spiritual fulfillment in a time in which social change and modern science had made many Britons anxious about their place in society and the universe. The agents saw their work in the Middle East, particularly during the war, as an opportunity to shape their own lives and Middle Eastern reality in the image of fiction.Less
This chapter explains why Britons were particularly drawn to the Ottoman Empire in this period and how intelligence agents' particular cultural motivations disposed them to epistemological experimentation. It describes the agents' central role in cultural production about the region, as famous explorers and authors intimate with Edwardian literary society, with whom they fashioned a new literary cult of the desert, in which the spy novel figured centrally. Many of them had gone to the Middle East looking for literary inspiration, a modernist aesthetic, romantic adventure, and spiritual fulfillment in a time in which social change and modern science had made many Britons anxious about their place in society and the universe. The agents saw their work in the Middle East, particularly during the war, as an opportunity to shape their own lives and Middle Eastern reality in the image of fiction.
Priya Satia
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195331417
- eISBN:
- 9780199868070
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195331417.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Early Modern History
This chapter describes the cultural legacy of the Middle Eastern campaigns. It argues that they offered the hope of some continuity with the past, undercutting the sense of total rupture produced by ...
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This chapter describes the cultural legacy of the Middle Eastern campaigns. It argues that they offered the hope of some continuity with the past, undercutting the sense of total rupture produced by the Western front. They offered a vision of a glamorous, biblical, Arabian‐Nights theater in which the old, adventurous, mobile sort of warfare still worked. The Kut disaster of the Mesopotamia campaign produced a redemptive vision of empire as a tool of colonial development. This helped package the new Middle East empire as a selfless endeavor in the increasingly anti‐imperialist postwar world. Central in the romantic image of these campaigns were the heroic figures that participated in them, including Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, and others, who acquired positions of enormous political and cultural influence after the war. Their celebrity was a product of an increasingly democratic public sphere fascinated with Arabia and struggling with changing notions of Englishness.Less
This chapter describes the cultural legacy of the Middle Eastern campaigns. It argues that they offered the hope of some continuity with the past, undercutting the sense of total rupture produced by the Western front. They offered a vision of a glamorous, biblical, Arabian‐Nights theater in which the old, adventurous, mobile sort of warfare still worked. The Kut disaster of the Mesopotamia campaign produced a redemptive vision of empire as a tool of colonial development. This helped package the new Middle East empire as a selfless endeavor in the increasingly anti‐imperialist postwar world. Central in the romantic image of these campaigns were the heroic figures that participated in them, including Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, and others, who acquired positions of enormous political and cultural influence after the war. Their celebrity was a product of an increasingly democratic public sphere fascinated with Arabia and struggling with changing notions of Englishness.
Anne Fernihough
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112358
- eISBN:
- 9780191670770
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112358.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This first extended study of D. H. Lawrence's aesthetics draws on a number of modern critical approaches to present an original and balanced analysis of his literary and art criticism, and of the ...
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This first extended study of D. H. Lawrence's aesthetics draws on a number of modern critical approaches to present an original and balanced analysis of his literary and art criticism, and of the complex cultural context from which it emerged. Emphasizing the influence on this most ‘English’ of writers of a German intellectual and cultural heritage, the author focuses on Lawrence's connections with the völkisch ideologies prevalent in Germany from 1910–1930, from which both Heideggerian philosophy and Nazism emerged. The deep-seated affinities between Lawrentian and Heideggerian aesthetics are examined for the first time, and the author highlights Lawrence's ‘green’ critique of industrialization. New light is shed on Lawrence's hostility towards Sigmund Freud, contrasting the two writers' thinking on art and the unconscious. The book's reassessment of Lawrence's relationship with Bloomsbury opposes the received view that Lawrence and the Bloomsbury art critics were poles apart. This study reveals Lawrence's art criticism as pluralistic and anti-authoritarian, a necessary antidote to his sometimes brutally authoritarian politics and to the dogma and rigidity that pervades so many other areas of Lawrence's thought.Less
This first extended study of D. H. Lawrence's aesthetics draws on a number of modern critical approaches to present an original and balanced analysis of his literary and art criticism, and of the complex cultural context from which it emerged. Emphasizing the influence on this most ‘English’ of writers of a German intellectual and cultural heritage, the author focuses on Lawrence's connections with the völkisch ideologies prevalent in Germany from 1910–1930, from which both Heideggerian philosophy and Nazism emerged. The deep-seated affinities between Lawrentian and Heideggerian aesthetics are examined for the first time, and the author highlights Lawrence's ‘green’ critique of industrialization. New light is shed on Lawrence's hostility towards Sigmund Freud, contrasting the two writers' thinking on art and the unconscious. The book's reassessment of Lawrence's relationship with Bloomsbury opposes the received view that Lawrence and the Bloomsbury art critics were poles apart. This study reveals Lawrence's art criticism as pluralistic and anti-authoritarian, a necessary antidote to his sometimes brutally authoritarian politics and to the dogma and rigidity that pervades so many other areas of Lawrence's thought.
Fernihough Anne
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112358
- eISBN:
- 9780191670770
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112358.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Clive Bell's Art (1914), one of the key texts of Bloomsbury art-criticism, is at best an incoherent work and, at worst, a disturbingly elitist one. Peter Fuller, in Art and Psychoanalysis, is harshly ...
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Clive Bell's Art (1914), one of the key texts of Bloomsbury art-criticism, is at best an incoherent work and, at worst, a disturbingly elitist one. Peter Fuller, in Art and Psychoanalysis, is harshly critical of it in ways that few people would wish to question, attacking Bell as ‘opinionated, arrogant, ultimately downright reactionary’, yet nonetheless finding in Bell's theory ‘kernels of truth’ that can shed light on his own arguments. In spite of its faults, Bell's Art is an important text for the student of D. H. Lawrence's art-criticism. Lawrence had many direct and indirect connections with Bloomsbury, and Bell and Roger Fry are two of the very few art-critics he takes the trouble to criticize overly. In fact, his attack on Bloomsbury aesthetics is vociferous and uncompromising. As a result, literary history has generally defined Lawrence's views on art in opposition to those of Bloomsbury, which is not the most fruitful way of approaching the art-criticism of either camp.Less
Clive Bell's Art (1914), one of the key texts of Bloomsbury art-criticism, is at best an incoherent work and, at worst, a disturbingly elitist one. Peter Fuller, in Art and Psychoanalysis, is harshly critical of it in ways that few people would wish to question, attacking Bell as ‘opinionated, arrogant, ultimately downright reactionary’, yet nonetheless finding in Bell's theory ‘kernels of truth’ that can shed light on his own arguments. In spite of its faults, Bell's Art is an important text for the student of D. H. Lawrence's art-criticism. Lawrence had many direct and indirect connections with Bloomsbury, and Bell and Roger Fry are two of the very few art-critics he takes the trouble to criticize overly. In fact, his attack on Bloomsbury aesthetics is vociferous and uncompromising. As a result, literary history has generally defined Lawrence's views on art in opposition to those of Bloomsbury, which is not the most fruitful way of approaching the art-criticism of either camp.
Fernihough Anne
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112358
- eISBN:
- 9780191670770
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112358.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
D. H. Lawrence and his Bloomsbury contemporaries shared many of the same concerns, and, in particular, they set out to dispel the myth of a naively mimetic art, seeing realism to be complicit with ...
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D. H. Lawrence and his Bloomsbury contemporaries shared many of the same concerns, and, in particular, they set out to dispel the myth of a naively mimetic art, seeing realism to be complicit with what would today be described as a logocentric model of language. It now seems that this idea of a naively mimetic realism was something of a shibboleth, and that Lawrence and the Bloomsbury critics deliberately presented it in crude and reductive terms. It is unlikely that unproblematic, one-to-one correspondence between elements of language and world was ever really assumed by realistic art, that art ever aspired to be the world, rendering itself curiously redundant, in the way that many modernist art theorists suggest. This is, however, what Lawrence and his Bloomsbury contemporaries tried to argue in order to further the cause of Post-Impressionism and other forms of modern art.Less
D. H. Lawrence and his Bloomsbury contemporaries shared many of the same concerns, and, in particular, they set out to dispel the myth of a naively mimetic art, seeing realism to be complicit with what would today be described as a logocentric model of language. It now seems that this idea of a naively mimetic realism was something of a shibboleth, and that Lawrence and the Bloomsbury critics deliberately presented it in crude and reductive terms. It is unlikely that unproblematic, one-to-one correspondence between elements of language and world was ever really assumed by realistic art, that art ever aspired to be the world, rendering itself curiously redundant, in the way that many modernist art theorists suggest. This is, however, what Lawrence and his Bloomsbury contemporaries tried to argue in order to further the cause of Post-Impressionism and other forms of modern art.
Fernihough Anne
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112358
- eISBN:
- 9780191670770
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112358.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
It has been argued in the last two chapters that D. H. Lawrence and the Bloomsbury art-critics had far more in common than the critical orthodoxy on modernist aesthetics would suggest. The extent to ...
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It has been argued in the last two chapters that D. H. Lawrence and the Bloomsbury art-critics had far more in common than the critical orthodoxy on modernist aesthetics would suggest. The extent to which their interests coincide is brought out by the fact that they all single out Paul Cézanne's work as a kind of paradigm or benchmark for what they think art should achieve. Clive Bell's Art, though making universal claims about art, was written very much as a defense of Cézanne's painting in particular, whilst Roger Fry devoted an entire study to Cézanne. Lawrence wrote his own longest essay in art-criticism, shortly after reading Bell's Art in January 1929. In the same month, he also read Fry's Cézanne: A Study of His Development (1927), a work to which he makes specific reference in his own essay. His comments on Fry's study are extremely dismissive, and, taking them at face value, many critics have been content to cite them as evidence of the radical Lawrence-Bloomsbury opposition.Less
It has been argued in the last two chapters that D. H. Lawrence and the Bloomsbury art-critics had far more in common than the critical orthodoxy on modernist aesthetics would suggest. The extent to which their interests coincide is brought out by the fact that they all single out Paul Cézanne's work as a kind of paradigm or benchmark for what they think art should achieve. Clive Bell's Art, though making universal claims about art, was written very much as a defense of Cézanne's painting in particular, whilst Roger Fry devoted an entire study to Cézanne. Lawrence wrote his own longest essay in art-criticism, shortly after reading Bell's Art in January 1929. In the same month, he also read Fry's Cézanne: A Study of His Development (1927), a work to which he makes specific reference in his own essay. His comments on Fry's study are extremely dismissive, and, taking them at face value, many critics have been content to cite them as evidence of the radical Lawrence-Bloomsbury opposition.
Peter Adkins and Derek Ryan (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781949979374
- eISBN:
- 9781800341791
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781949979374.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
From the “prying,” “insidious” “fingers of the European War” that Septimus Warren Smith would never be free of in Mrs Dalloway to the call to “think peace into existence” during the Blitz in ...
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From the “prying,” “insidious” “fingers of the European War” that Septimus Warren Smith would never be free of in Mrs Dalloway to the call to “think peace into existence” during the Blitz in “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” questions of war and peace pervade the writings of Virginia Woolf. This volume asks how Woolf conceptualised peace by exploring the various experimental forms she created in response to war and violence. Comprised of fifteen chapters by an international array of leading and emerging scholars, this book both draws out theoretical dimensions of Woolf’s modernist aesthetic and draws on various critical frameworks for reading her work, in order to deepen our understanding of her writing about the politics of war, ethics, feminism, class, animality, and European culture.
The chapters collected here look at how we might re-read Woolf and her contemporaries in the light of new theoretical and aesthetical innovations, such as peace studies, post-critique, queer theory, and animal studies. It also asks how we might historicise these frameworks through Woolf’s own engagement with the First and Second World Wars, while also bringing her writings on peace into dialogue with those of others in the Bloomsbury Group. In doing so, this volume reassesses the role of Europe and peace in Woolf’s work and opens up new ways of reading her oeuvre.Less
From the “prying,” “insidious” “fingers of the European War” that Septimus Warren Smith would never be free of in Mrs Dalloway to the call to “think peace into existence” during the Blitz in “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” questions of war and peace pervade the writings of Virginia Woolf. This volume asks how Woolf conceptualised peace by exploring the various experimental forms she created in response to war and violence. Comprised of fifteen chapters by an international array of leading and emerging scholars, this book both draws out theoretical dimensions of Woolf’s modernist aesthetic and draws on various critical frameworks for reading her work, in order to deepen our understanding of her writing about the politics of war, ethics, feminism, class, animality, and European culture.
The chapters collected here look at how we might re-read Woolf and her contemporaries in the light of new theoretical and aesthetical innovations, such as peace studies, post-critique, queer theory, and animal studies. It also asks how we might historicise these frameworks through Woolf’s own engagement with the First and Second World Wars, while also bringing her writings on peace into dialogue with those of others in the Bloomsbury Group. In doing so, this volume reassesses the role of Europe and peace in Woolf’s work and opens up new ways of reading her oeuvre.
Patrick Parrinder
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199264858
- eISBN:
- 9780191698989
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199264858.003.0014
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The decline of the British Empire was a popular subject of English fiction and a contended topic in English identity. ‘Bloomsbury’ ethics emerged from the traditional idealism of literary culture. ...
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The decline of the British Empire was a popular subject of English fiction and a contended topic in English identity. ‘Bloomsbury’ ethics emerged from the traditional idealism of literary culture. The chapter contains a detailed discussion of the works of Foster, Kipling, Orwell, and J. A. Hobson on imperialism.Less
The decline of the British Empire was a popular subject of English fiction and a contended topic in English identity. ‘Bloomsbury’ ethics emerged from the traditional idealism of literary culture. The chapter contains a detailed discussion of the works of Foster, Kipling, Orwell, and J. A. Hobson on imperialism.
Jose Harris
- Published in print:
- 1997
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198206859
- eISBN:
- 9780191677335
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206859.003.0012
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History, Social History
This chapter talks about how Beveridge spent eighteen years at the London School of Economics, which he succeeded in establishing as a leading centre for the social sciences. From the start of its ...
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This chapter talks about how Beveridge spent eighteen years at the London School of Economics, which he succeeded in establishing as a leading centre for the social sciences. From the start of its history, the School had acquired a socialist reputation. As Vice-Chancellor of London University between 1926 and 1928, Beveridge also laid the foundations for a new centralised university and was responsible for acquiring and raising funds for the university's Bloomsbury site. Although, Beveridge's new job was not precisely what he had expected, he nevertheless threw himself into it with characteristic zeal and energy. The chapter also looks at how Beveridge's family life was not calculated to improve his irascible temper, and for much of his time at the LSE he was under continuous domestic strain.Less
This chapter talks about how Beveridge spent eighteen years at the London School of Economics, which he succeeded in establishing as a leading centre for the social sciences. From the start of its history, the School had acquired a socialist reputation. As Vice-Chancellor of London University between 1926 and 1928, Beveridge also laid the foundations for a new centralised university and was responsible for acquiring and raising funds for the university's Bloomsbury site. Although, Beveridge's new job was not precisely what he had expected, he nevertheless threw himself into it with characteristic zeal and energy. The chapter also looks at how Beveridge's family life was not calculated to improve his irascible temper, and for much of his time at the LSE he was under continuous domestic strain.
Anne Witchard (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780748690954
- eISBN:
- 9781474422185
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748690954.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Drama
This volume examines the ways in which an intellectual vogue for a mythic China was a constituent element of British Modernism. Traditionally defined as a decorative style that conjured a fanciful ...
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This volume examines the ways in which an intellectual vogue for a mythic China was a constituent element of British Modernism. Traditionally defined as a decorative style that conjured a fanciful and idealized notion of China, chinoiserie was revived in London's avant-garde circles, the Bloomsbury group, the Vorticists and others, who like their eighteenth-century forebears, turned to China as a cultural and aesthetic utopia. As part of Modernism's challenge to the 'universality' of so-called Western values and aesthetics, the turn to China would contribute much more than has been acknowledged to Modernist thinking. As the book demonstrates, China as an intellectual and aesthetic utopia dazzled intellectuals and aesthetes, while at the same time the consumption of Chinese exoticism became commercialized. The essays cover performance and visual media, theatre, fashion, film and dance, interior and garden design, as well as literature, painting and poetry, showing that from cutting-edge Modernist chic to mass culture and consumer products, the vogue for chinoiserie style and motifs permeated the art and design of the period.Less
This volume examines the ways in which an intellectual vogue for a mythic China was a constituent element of British Modernism. Traditionally defined as a decorative style that conjured a fanciful and idealized notion of China, chinoiserie was revived in London's avant-garde circles, the Bloomsbury group, the Vorticists and others, who like their eighteenth-century forebears, turned to China as a cultural and aesthetic utopia. As part of Modernism's challenge to the 'universality' of so-called Western values and aesthetics, the turn to China would contribute much more than has been acknowledged to Modernist thinking. As the book demonstrates, China as an intellectual and aesthetic utopia dazzled intellectuals and aesthetes, while at the same time the consumption of Chinese exoticism became commercialized. The essays cover performance and visual media, theatre, fashion, film and dance, interior and garden design, as well as literature, painting and poetry, showing that from cutting-edge Modernist chic to mass culture and consumer products, the vogue for chinoiserie style and motifs permeated the art and design of the period.
Brenda S. Helt and Madelyn Detloff (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474401692
- eISBN:
- 9781474422123
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474401692.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Queer Bloomsbury consists of queer studies essays by sixteen renowned experts on the Bloomsbury Group. The book explores cultural, ideological and aesthetic facets of the Bloomsbury Group's ...
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Queer Bloomsbury consists of queer studies essays by sixteen renowned experts on the Bloomsbury Group. The book explores cultural, ideological and aesthetic facets of the Bloomsbury Group's development as a queer subculture and provides substantive information on the queer philosophical and ethical underpinnings of the group. The book elaborates the ways the Bloomsbury Group queered their living arrangements, loves and sexual relationships, daily routines, friendships and companions, enabling them to think and work in ways we now term ‘modernist’. Reimagining their lives queerly, even the heterosexual members were able to think outside the heteronormative structures and strictures of their parents' Victorianism and Britain's Georgian era. Their modernist ideology and aesthetics were enabled by their queer ones. In addition to new essays by widely recognized Bloomsbury scholars, five important ground-breaking essays are republished here, including Carolyn Heilbrun's germinal 1968 essay on the sexual dissidence of the Bloomsbury Group and Christopher Reed's influential 1991 essay exposing homophobia among academic scholars writing about the group. Also included are rarely seen reproductions of Duncan Grant's and Carrington's work from archives and a private collection. The book is edited and introduced by Brenda Helt and Madelyn Detloff. Essays are authored by Carolyn Heilbrun, Brenda Silver, Christopher Reed, George Piggford, Bill Maurer, Brenda Helt, Regina Marler, Darren Clarke, Todd Avery, Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr., Madelyn Detloff, Elyse Blankley, Mark Hussey, Jodie Medd and Kimberly Engdahl Coates.Less
Queer Bloomsbury consists of queer studies essays by sixteen renowned experts on the Bloomsbury Group. The book explores cultural, ideological and aesthetic facets of the Bloomsbury Group's development as a queer subculture and provides substantive information on the queer philosophical and ethical underpinnings of the group. The book elaborates the ways the Bloomsbury Group queered their living arrangements, loves and sexual relationships, daily routines, friendships and companions, enabling them to think and work in ways we now term ‘modernist’. Reimagining their lives queerly, even the heterosexual members were able to think outside the heteronormative structures and strictures of their parents' Victorianism and Britain's Georgian era. Their modernist ideology and aesthetics were enabled by their queer ones. In addition to new essays by widely recognized Bloomsbury scholars, five important ground-breaking essays are republished here, including Carolyn Heilbrun's germinal 1968 essay on the sexual dissidence of the Bloomsbury Group and Christopher Reed's influential 1991 essay exposing homophobia among academic scholars writing about the group. Also included are rarely seen reproductions of Duncan Grant's and Carrington's work from archives and a private collection. The book is edited and introduced by Brenda Helt and Madelyn Detloff. Essays are authored by Carolyn Heilbrun, Brenda Silver, Christopher Reed, George Piggford, Bill Maurer, Brenda Helt, Regina Marler, Darren Clarke, Todd Avery, Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr., Madelyn Detloff, Elyse Blankley, Mark Hussey, Jodie Medd and Kimberly Engdahl Coates.
Cecil Woolf
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780983533955
- eISBN:
- 9781781384930
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780983533955.003.0037
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter addresses the connection between Bloomsbury and Scotland by sharing some memories of Duncan Grant, which it describes as “the sole Scotsman in the Bloomsbury group and an artist who ...
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This chapter addresses the connection between Bloomsbury and Scotland by sharing some memories of Duncan Grant, which it describes as “the sole Scotsman in the Bloomsbury group and an artist who remained for more than two decades one of Britain's most celebrated painters, someone about whom Virginia Woolf seriously considered writing a biography.” The chapter talks of memories from the time of getting to know Grant in Leonard Woolf's London house. The most interesting moments spent with Grant were when visiting exhibitions and Grant then talked of what he loved most, painting. The chapter notes that Grant's reputation as a painter suffered from his close association with Bloomsbury.Less
This chapter addresses the connection between Bloomsbury and Scotland by sharing some memories of Duncan Grant, which it describes as “the sole Scotsman in the Bloomsbury group and an artist who remained for more than two decades one of Britain's most celebrated painters, someone about whom Virginia Woolf seriously considered writing a biography.” The chapter talks of memories from the time of getting to know Grant in Leonard Woolf's London house. The most interesting moments spent with Grant were when visiting exhibitions and Grant then talked of what he loved most, painting. The chapter notes that Grant's reputation as a painter suffered from his close association with Bloomsbury.
Anne Witchard
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9789888139606
- eISBN:
- 9789882208643
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888139606.003.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
The introduction situates Lao She in relation to China's New Culture movement and the protest movements of May Fourth. It is 1928 and during the four years that Lao She has spent in London he has ...
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The introduction situates Lao She in relation to China's New Culture movement and the protest movements of May Fourth. It is 1928 and during the four years that Lao She has spent in London he has published two novels in China's prestigious Fiction Monthly (Xiaoshuo yuebao) and is working on a third, Mr Ma and Son: Two Chinese in London (Er Ma, 1929). Unlike the first two, with their nostalgically detailed evocations of life in Peking, this novel will be an indictment of British imperialist ideology and a Chinese wake-up call. Lao She came to work in London through the auspices of the London Missionary Society (LMS). This was the period seen as the apex of high modernism in Britain and Lao She's early fiction registers this interaction in ways that suggest we rethink his reputation beyond that of his proletarian classic, Rickshaw Boy (Luotuo Xiangzi, 1937). ReadingLao She as an incipient modernist, initiating in China new subject matter and new styles of writing in the endeavour to remake the sensibility of the Chinese people, serves to unsettle Eurocentric considerations of literary modernism as exclusively Western, its place of origin unquestionably the metropolitan West.Less
The introduction situates Lao She in relation to China's New Culture movement and the protest movements of May Fourth. It is 1928 and during the four years that Lao She has spent in London he has published two novels in China's prestigious Fiction Monthly (Xiaoshuo yuebao) and is working on a third, Mr Ma and Son: Two Chinese in London (Er Ma, 1929). Unlike the first two, with their nostalgically detailed evocations of life in Peking, this novel will be an indictment of British imperialist ideology and a Chinese wake-up call. Lao She came to work in London through the auspices of the London Missionary Society (LMS). This was the period seen as the apex of high modernism in Britain and Lao She's early fiction registers this interaction in ways that suggest we rethink his reputation beyond that of his proletarian classic, Rickshaw Boy (Luotuo Xiangzi, 1937). ReadingLao She as an incipient modernist, initiating in China new subject matter and new styles of writing in the endeavour to remake the sensibility of the Chinese people, serves to unsettle Eurocentric considerations of literary modernism as exclusively Western, its place of origin unquestionably the metropolitan West.
Veronika Fuechtner
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520258372
- eISBN:
- 9780520950382
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520258372.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
One hundred years after the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute was established, this book recovers the cultural and intellectual history connected to this vibrant organization and places it alongside ...
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One hundred years after the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute was established, this book recovers the cultural and intellectual history connected to this vibrant organization and places it alongside the London Bloomsbury group, the Paris Surrealist circle, and the Viennese fin-de-siècle as a crucial chapter in the history of modernism. Taking us from World War I Berlin to the Third Reich and beyond to 1940s Palestine and 1950s New York — and to the influential work of the Frankfurt School — the book traces the network of artists and psychoanalysts that began in Germany and continued in exile. Connecting movements, forms, and themes such as Dada, multi-perspectivity, and the urban experience with the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, it illuminates themes distinctive to the Berlin psychoanalytic context such as war trauma, masculinity and femininity, race and anti-Semitism, and the cultural avant-garde. In particular, it explores the lives and works of Alfred Döblin, Max Eitingon, Georg Groddeck, Karen Horney, Richard Huelsenbeck, Count Hermann von Keyserling, Ernst Simmel, and Arnold Zweig.Less
One hundred years after the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute was established, this book recovers the cultural and intellectual history connected to this vibrant organization and places it alongside the London Bloomsbury group, the Paris Surrealist circle, and the Viennese fin-de-siècle as a crucial chapter in the history of modernism. Taking us from World War I Berlin to the Third Reich and beyond to 1940s Palestine and 1950s New York — and to the influential work of the Frankfurt School — the book traces the network of artists and psychoanalysts that began in Germany and continued in exile. Connecting movements, forms, and themes such as Dada, multi-perspectivity, and the urban experience with the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, it illuminates themes distinctive to the Berlin psychoanalytic context such as war trauma, masculinity and femininity, race and anti-Semitism, and the cultural avant-garde. In particular, it explores the lives and works of Alfred Döblin, Max Eitingon, Georg Groddeck, Karen Horney, Richard Huelsenbeck, Count Hermann von Keyserling, Ernst Simmel, and Arnold Zweig.
Sydney Janet Kaplan
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748641482
- eISBN:
- 9780748671595
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748641482.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
The chapter begins with an intertextual reading of Mansfield's short story, ‘Bliss’ and Murry's Still Life. That reading emphasises differences between Murry and Mansfield in their fictional ...
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The chapter begins with an intertextual reading of Mansfield's short story, ‘Bliss’ and Murry's Still Life. That reading emphasises differences between Murry and Mansfield in their fictional treatment of the concept of ‘bliss’, female sexuality, bisexuality, and the power dynamics of marriage. The chapter then explores the ways that Murry's and Mansfield's relations with Lady Ottoline Morrell underlie the structure of ‘Bliss’. It considers how these relations mark a general shift from the influence of Lawrence to that of Bloomsbury on Murry and Mansfield.Less
The chapter begins with an intertextual reading of Mansfield's short story, ‘Bliss’ and Murry's Still Life. That reading emphasises differences between Murry and Mansfield in their fictional treatment of the concept of ‘bliss’, female sexuality, bisexuality, and the power dynamics of marriage. The chapter then explores the ways that Murry's and Mansfield's relations with Lady Ottoline Morrell underlie the structure of ‘Bliss’. It considers how these relations mark a general shift from the influence of Lawrence to that of Bloomsbury on Murry and Mansfield.
Sydney Janet Kaplan
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748641482
- eISBN:
- 9780748671595
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748641482.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter discusses Mansfield's return to London in April 1918, her marriage to Murry, and their adversarial relations with Lady Ottoline Morrell and others associated with Bloomsbury that ...
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This chapter discusses Mansfield's return to London in April 1918, her marriage to Murry, and their adversarial relations with Lady Ottoline Morrell and others associated with Bloomsbury that resulted from Murry's negative review of the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon. It considers the change in these relations when Murry took over the editorship of the Athenaeum in 1919, especially the cautious friendship between Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, and the professional competition between Murry and T. S. Eliot.Less
This chapter discusses Mansfield's return to London in April 1918, her marriage to Murry, and their adversarial relations with Lady Ottoline Morrell and others associated with Bloomsbury that resulted from Murry's negative review of the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon. It considers the change in these relations when Murry took over the editorship of the Athenaeum in 1919, especially the cautious friendship between Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, and the professional competition between Murry and T. S. Eliot.
Peter Adkins and Derek Ryan
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781949979374
- eISBN:
- 9781800341791
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781949979374.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Beginning with a discussion of Virginia Woolf’s response to the 1918 armistice and her fictional reimagining of it in her novel The Years, this introduction sets out the importance of questions of ...
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Beginning with a discussion of Virginia Woolf’s response to the 1918 armistice and her fictional reimagining of it in her novel The Years, this introduction sets out the importance of questions of peace and Europe to Woolf’s practices as a writer. Situating Woolf within broader literary responses to questions of war and peace, including those who supported war, such as H.G. Wells, and her involvement with the pacifism of the Bloomsbury Group, we explore Woolf’s legacy as a writer whose aesthetical innovations and theoretical interventions aimed to bring new ideas of peaceful co-existence into being. Surveying the critical legacy of Woolf as a theorist of war and of violence, we suggest that the recent turn to “weak theory” within modernist studies can benefit from Woolf’s literary pacifism and her willingness to embrace “the subjunctive, the speculative, and the counterfactual”.Less
Beginning with a discussion of Virginia Woolf’s response to the 1918 armistice and her fictional reimagining of it in her novel The Years, this introduction sets out the importance of questions of peace and Europe to Woolf’s practices as a writer. Situating Woolf within broader literary responses to questions of war and peace, including those who supported war, such as H.G. Wells, and her involvement with the pacifism of the Bloomsbury Group, we explore Woolf’s legacy as a writer whose aesthetical innovations and theoretical interventions aimed to bring new ideas of peaceful co-existence into being. Surveying the critical legacy of Woolf as a theorist of war and of violence, we suggest that the recent turn to “weak theory” within modernist studies can benefit from Woolf’s literary pacifism and her willingness to embrace “the subjunctive, the speculative, and the counterfactual”.
