Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 6/16/2011
EAN 9781107006041, ISBN10: 110700604X
Hardcover, 272 pages, 23.5 x 16 x 1.7 cm
Language: English
Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy integrates studies of six members and associates of the Bloomsbury group into a rich narrative of early twentieth century culture, encompassing changes in the demographics of private and public life, and Freudian and sexological assaults on middle-class proprieties Jesse Wolfe shows how numerous modernist writers felt torn between the inherited institutions of monogamy and marriage and emerging theories of sexuality which challenged Victorian notions of maleness and femaleness. For Wolfe, this ambivalence was a primary source of the Bloomsbury writers' aesthetic strength: Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and others brought the paradoxes of modern intimacy to thrilling life on the page. By combining literary criticism with forays into philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, and the avant-garde art of Vienna, this book offers a fresh account of the reciprocal relations between culture and society in that key site for literary modernism known as Bloomsbury.
Introduction
narrating Bloomsbury
Part I. Philosophical Backgrounds
1. The apostle
yellowy goodness in Bloomsbury's bible
2. The analyst
Freud's denial of innocence
Part II. Defeated Husbands
3. The Bloomsburian
Forster's missing figures
4. The adversary
the love that cannot be escaped
Part III. Domestic Angels
5. The Bloomsburian
Woolf's sane woman in the attic
6. The acolyte
a return to essences
Conclusion
the prescience of the two Bloomsburies
Appendices
Notes
Bibliography
Index.