This chapter examines how Bloomsbury and music intersected at the figure of Edward J. Dent, the Cambridge music scholar. It offers Dent as an embodiment of which Bloomsbury and early twentieth-century musical culture in England and Europe were mutually constitutive, using him as a point for comparison to gauge Bloomsbury’s musical enthusiasm and sensibility. The chapter first surveys existing musical-literary criticism within studies of Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster. It then explores the overlaps between Dent and Bloomsbury on issues including non-European musical cultures, sexuality, personal relationship, modernist aesthetics, music as a performing art, international politics, education, and state funding. Following a discussion of Dent’s involvement during and after the Second World War in John Maynard Keynes’ work on “national” opera, the chapter ends with Keynes by examining one of his letters to the BBC as an epitome of music’s protean role in Bloomsbury.

Amid economic crises, rising totalitarianisms, and escalating technological warfare of the 1930s and 1940s, Bloomsbury’s thinkers and artists entered a new phase. They had never thought alike, nor considered themselves a “group,” but, beyond their colorful private sociability, these public-spirited “civilized individuals” carried the banner of their liberal intellectual formation – their critical hope and utopian idealism – into collective arenas. Drawing upon the late art, thought, letters, and conversation of Sigmund Freud, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, and Vita Sackville-West, this chapter explores late Bloomsbury’s dialectic of enlightenment, as darkening skies tested the hope that European civilization, smashed by the Great War, might be rebuilt on firmer and more lasting ground. As domestic and international crises bore a shrinking world toward an unknowable future, Bloomsbury’s civilized individualism – which, Raymond Williams thought, offered no vision of a whole society – springs into high relief against the existential threat of totalitarian systems on right and left that emerged from radically different national histories. In late Bloomsbury, we glimpse the threats of authoritarianism, racialized imperialism, genocidal violence, all-consuming capitalism, and earth-ravaging technological modernity.

This chapter makes the case that Bloomsbury acted, crucially, as both the receptacle and the conduit for emerging ideas of psychoanalysis in Britain in the 1910s and beyond, with Bloomsbury functioning as a major vehicle for assimilating, disseminating, publishing, and translating emerging psychoanalytic ideas about feeling, emotion, and the unconscious to and for early twentieth-century British literature and culture. Bloomsbury figures read, reviewed, and translated Freud, trained as psychoanalysts, and held psychoanalytical gatherings, while Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press was the first to publish Freud’s work in English. Psychoanalytic texts would become central to the Hogarth Press’ lists, with the Press publishing texts including Freud’s Collected Papers and The International Psycho-Analytical Library, and books or lectures by early interpreters and practitioners of psychoanalysis and psychology, including Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi, Melanie Klein, René Laforgue, Charles Mauron, and Anna Freud. Further, this chapter argues that in a parallel and equally stunning act of “translation” from continental European thought into British culture, Bloomsbury also brought Post-Impressionist art to the English-speaking world during roughly the same period, with Roger Fry using language inflected by emerging psychoanalysis about “emotion” and “feeling” to describe both the production and the readerly reception of Post-Impressionist works of art.

This chapter examines how the friendships, loves, jealousies, anecdotes, and conversations of the Bloomsbury members, recorded in various auto/biographical sources, have been dramatized and novelized in several contemporary bioplays and biographical novels: Bloomsbury: A Play in Two Acts (1974) by Peter Luke; But Nobody Lives in Bloomsbury (2006) by Gillian Freeman; Vanessa and Virginia (2008) by Susan Sellers; and Vanessa and Her Sister (2014) by Priya Parmar. The chapter focuses more particularly on the character of Virginia, who plays a crucial role in the intellectual and emotional dynamics of the group, and analyzes her interactions with her friends, especially Lytton, and her relationships with her family members, especially Vanessa. These posthumous literary representations of the iconic author raise questions about the resurrection and transposition of the historical figure in fiction and drama, as well as about updating and recycling her literary heritage for today’s readers and spectators.

By providing an overview of the varied shorter fictions produced by key Bloomsbury group members, this essay touches on some significant short fiction writers among its outer circles. Virginia Woolf’s shorter fiction features prominently; the chapter conveys the volume and variety of the short fictions that she produced – though rarely published – during her lifetime. It also gives due attention to Woolf’s husband Leonard’s overlooked experiments with fiction, including his “Three Jews,” which was published with Virginia’s “The Mark on the Wall” as Two Stories (1917), their Hogarth Press’ first publication. Within E. M. Forster’s significant short fiction output, particular attention is paid to works published – like his radical novel of homosexual awakening Maurice – after his death. The chapter takes in some early stories by Mulk Raj Anand, the prolific Indian writer associated with Bloomsbury through Forster, and gives a flavor of the enormous variety in lesser known stories by core group members such as Desmond MacCarthy, David Garnett, and Lytton Strachey – encompassing ghost stories, speculative queer fictions, Jamesian social commentaries, and allegorical flights of fancy.

China has always had a space in the British imagination. Beginning in the eighteenth century, images and the aesthetic of China were a part of daily life – the glint of a blue and white willow teacup, a fan or screen with a Chinese landscape, a silk dress with a pagoda pattern, a rock garden. This new aesthetic flourished alongside the pragmatic reality that China was an imperial space for trade and exploitation by England. Though the aesthetic and transnational crossings were heralded by art historian, Roger Fry, and others in Bloomsbury in the 1920–30s, the transnational conversation has been neglected in modernist scholarship until recently. This chapter addresses the gap and describes a resurgence of interest in the cultural, literary, and aesthetic crossings between England and China through a specific study of the literary Crescent Moon group in China founded by Xu Zhimo in 1925 and Bloomsbury. Extensive study in British and Chinese libraries and travel reveals a transnational modernist discourse and relationships among the two literary groups, including Ling Shuhua, Virginia Woolf, Julian Bell, Xu Zhimo, and Xiao Qian, as well as several other British and Chinese intellectuals and artists.

This chapter places Bloomsbury at the center of the story of meritocracy in twentieth-century Britain by considering four figures: H. A. L. Fisher, President of the Board of Education in Lloyd George’s wartime cabinet and Virginia Woolf’s cousin; educationalist Bertrand Russell; Virginia Woolf, who critiqued meritocratic systems in Three Guineas (1938); and Angelica Garnett, who examined meritocracy in Deceived with Kindness (1984). The chapter argues that Fisher was the architect of a vision of technocratic meritocracy that sought to overcome competition through the promise of a flexible educational system that could meet the needs of every child. Russell and Woolf were critics of the mindscape of meritocracy. Both associated competitive educational systems with militarism, while Woolf harnessed her pacifist critique of meritocracy to feminist ends. Angelica Garnett explores the affective aspects of meritocracy’s ethic of individual effort, competition, and reward. As Garnett’s memoir suggests, exclusion from the meritocratic journey was as defining an experience as inclusion in its rites and rituals.

“Bloomsbury,” South Asia and empire have always been closely interconnected. Until recently, scholarship has focused primarily on discussions of E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India (1924), Leonard Woolf’s autobiography Growing, detailing his years living in Ceylon, his novel The Village in the Jungle (1913), and Stories of the East (1921), or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). Whilst revisiting the Bloomsbury group’s close relations with pre-1947 colonial India (now independent India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), this chapter will open up the presence of “South Asia” within Bloomsbury to consider it as a transnational geographical and intellectual contact zone, a location that linked members of the Bloomsbury group with key South Asian writers, radicals, and intellectuals, including Mulk Raj Anand, Meary James Tambimuttu, and Aubrey Menen, and their networks. It will offer a differently articulated idea of a transnational modernity, one situated outside the orthodoxies of modernism’s Euro-American canon, and which presents a more variegated consideration of the complex and dynamic exchanges that were taking place at the heart of empire.

This chapter addresses the diverse modes in which poetry is found in and around Bloomsbury by focusing on three different aspects. First, it charts the presence of poetry and poets across different Hogarth Press series (the Hogarth Essays, the Hogarth Lectures on Literature, and Hogarth Living Poets). Second, it considers poetry both as a genre and as a critical issue in the debate on form in art, for example in Woolf’s numerous essays on prose and on the novel, in which her discourse on the subject is inextricably linked to her reflections on poetry, or in the work of Roger Fry, Charles Mauron, and Julian Bell on Mallarmé. Third, it focuses on Julian Bell’s practice of and critical discourse on poetry as they develop in crucial moments for the Bloomsbury group more at large. By addressing these points, the chapter outlines a network of people across generations whose discourse on, or writing of, poetry intersected in one way or another with the cultural and aesthetic practices of the group, thus illuminating some of the fertile tensions and contradictions within it.

The essentially “Bloomsbury” features of the modern novel include the effort to find a significant form for personal relationships, innovations in the representation of gender and sexuality, and the cultivation of aesthetic environments. But Bloomsbury’s signature contribution to literary modernity is “the Bloomsbury voice.” Unlike other more radical forms of narration, the Bloomsbury voice (in novels by Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Mulk Raj Anand, and Desmond McCarthy) bespeaks a residual commitment to history and a nostalgic faith in public authority. However, the Bloomsbury voice of historical authority engages ironically with history in crisis, and the result is not only quintessentially Bloomsbury but also a narrative mode more generally well suited to registering the crisis of modernity itself.

This chapter explores Bloomsbury’s engagements with the United States of America between 1900 and 1960. It analyzes the personal and published writings of various members of the group about American art, politics, and culture. While there is no cohesive “Bloomsbury” position on the USA, it at once fascinated and appalled them, from their university days until late in their lives. From Roger Fry’s tenure at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, until his falling out with J. P. Morgan, through the widespread outrage in Britain at the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, and on to J. M. Keynes’ role at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 and Clive Bell’s 1950s lecture tours, the USA is a constant presence in their lives. Some welcomed the income that writing for American periodicals provided, while privately disdaining their readers. Others engaged with American politicians on the world stage in the wake of two World Wars. None of those who are associated with “Bloomsbury” held static views about the USA. This chapter explores how they refined and revised their opinions about it throughout the course of their lives.

Doubling as a theorist of literary character, Virginia Woolf was invested in the tribulations of the modern face, which she approached through the twin genres of portraiture and biography. This chapter revolves around Woolf’s staging of the modernist face in her novel Orlando: A Biography (1928). Woolf’s novel traces a change in the history of the physiognomic face in modernity – from Orlando’s memorable face-to-face with Queen Elizabeth in the early modern period to her search for meaning in the faces around her in London in 1928. At the same time, Woolf’s novel functions as a portrait of Vita Sackville-West, introducing a queer woman into the gallery of memorable historical characters, which Woolf visualized in relation to the all-male National Portrait Gallery in London. Through an engagement with Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s recent photographic reflections on Orlando, developed as a response to the racialized opening of the novel, the chapter frames modernist faciality’s mediation by racial difference.

The conclusion returns to Charlotte Brontë to consider why Victorian authors might have preferred to explore pre-reflective experiences through episodes of getting lost rather than through the technique of stream-of-consciousness narration. The conclusion also addresses more directly the disturbing resemblance of strategic confusion to the willful ignorance that enables white people to uphold oppressive norms.

Literature is the space in which the inadmissible – including the otherwise largely unacceptable or unspeakable question of suicide – can be addressed. Focusing on the prominence of representations of suicide in modernist literature, this chapter addresses the question in the work of Woolf, Joyce, and Beckett. It argues that in Samuel Beckett’s major works, suicide appears prominently, and yet in the margins, while the works that thematise suicide are relatively minor in the Beckett canon. By distancing the act from the affective intensity with which it is usually associated, Beckett’s prolific references to suicide present the act as both unexceptional and lacking in pathos. This view of suicide can be aligned with the late-nineteenth-century views of the psychiatrist Henry Maudsley, who considers suicide, ‘just a necessary incident from time to time’ in the course of the subject’s evolutions.

This chapter begins with a re-reading of Henri Lefebvre’s theorisation of social space and representation in his influential volume, The Production of Space (1974). Since the appearance of its English translation in 1991, Lefebvre’s theories have proved to be foundational for much of the work on literature and space that has emerged over the previous few decades, particularly his distinction between representations of space and representational spaces. The chapter thus traces the impact of Lefebvre’s work upon various literary critics and cultural geographers, exploring the development of ideas of textual space, concepts of space and place, and the relation between material and metaphorical spaces. The chapter then moves to consider the concept of scale, an idea somewhat neglected by Lefebvre, but which has begun to gain traction with critics writing on, for example, world literature and modernism (such as Nirvana Tanoukhi, Susan Stanford Friedman, and the essays in the 2017 volume edited by Tavel Clarke and David Wittenberg). Thinking through the question of ‘what is the scale of the literary object’ (as posed by Rebecca Walkowitz) thus offers a new way to understand the complex relations between representation, literary texts, and diverse forms of social space (local, regional, national, transnational, global).

This chapter suggests that Auerbach’s quotation of Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” on the title page of Mimesis sets a tone simultaneously coy and optimistic in its use of the tradition of Renaissance love lyric, and it traces that optimism in Auerbach’s reading of To the Lighthouse and his devotion to aesthetic historism.

This chapter reads the formulation of modernism itself as a passive revolution in Virginia Woolf’s experimental prose. The passive revolution she conceives in The Waves, like Gramsci’s rendering of the “revolution without revolution," plays on the paradox of conservative content and radical form. Woolf’s novel illuminates the failures of high modernism to represent the world and performs a kind of self-critique, as well as a critique of the limitations of Western modernism created by a bourgeois class with a pretense for world-making in concert with the British establishment. The Waves advances the idea of global modernism by seeing the world as an invention of language wielded by an ambitious few. Colonial India stands at the center as that misty site of desire and loss against which the communal identity of its six characters is formed. Empire is imagined here as a vacuum, with absence at its center, and formalized in Woolf’s novel as a passive revolution tied to the advancing day.

This chapter interprets Virginia Woolf’s The Waves through the economic theory of John Maynard Keynes. Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money waxes nostalgic for a world of industrial capital where people with good characters invest in respected businesses over the long term. Keynes blames the “great slump” on a system of financial speculation made possible by the modern corporation that encourages investors to anticipate and value the vacillations of popular opinion instead of sound business practices. This chapter argues that Woolf’s novel encodes the logic of financial speculation as described by Keynes in her depiction of characters who redefine themselves according to fluctuating social configurations. The resulting novelistic poetics constitute an aesthetic of volatility characteristic of high modernism that anticipates the emergence of affective intensity as the dominant value form of our own era of capitalism.

Focusing particularly on the work of painter and critic Roger Fry, critic Clive Bell, novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf, and literary theorist I. A. Richards, the final chapter considers the legacy of evolutionary aestheticism in the first decades of the twentieth century. Although these twentieth-century writers rejected the developmental telos that defined nineteenth-century evolutionary aestheticism, this chapter argues that they inherited many of their predecessors’ ideas about the anti-utilitarian ethics of beauty, the spiritual potency of aesthetic pleasure, and, consequently, the long-term social benefits of good taste. By drawing a through line from mid nineteenth-century evolutionary aesthetics to the aesthetics of the Bloomsbury group and the principles of New Criticism, this chapter also contributes to a body of recent scholarship reassessing conventional narratives about modernism and its purportedly radical break from Victorian concerns and values.

The Introduction outlines the intellectual and literary context of Modernist Hellenism, situating the book in relation to other scholarship in modernist and reception studies and classical receptions. It discusses the discourses both of modernism and of hellenism current in the first half of the twentieth century, and begins to sketch out the ways in which Pound and H.D.’s poetic and translational practice differs from those, expanding on each poet’s theories of poetic composition as translation.