Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-garde: War, Civilization, Modernity

Gender and Culture Series

by Christine Froula

Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde traces the dynamic emergence of Woolf's art and thought against Bloomsbury's public thinking about Europe's future in a period marked by two world wars and rising threats of totalitarianism. Educated informally in her father's library and in Bloomsbury's London extension of Cambridge, Virginia Woolf came of age in the prewar decades, when progressive political and social movements gave hope that Europe "might really be on the brink of becoming civilized," as Leonard Woolf put it. For pacifist Bloomsbury, heir to Europe's unfinished Enlightenment project of human rights, democratic self-governance, and world peace―and, in E. M. Forster's words, "the only genuine movement in English civilization"― the 1914 "civil war" exposed barbarities within belligerent nationalisms, rapacious racialized economic imperialism, oppressive class and sex/gender systems, a tragic and unnecessary war that mobilized sixty-five million and left thirty-seven million casualties. An avant-garde in the twentieth-century struggle against the violence within European civilization, Bloomsbury and Woolf contributed richly to interwar debates on Europe's future at a moment when democracy's triumph over fascism and communism was by no means assured.

Woolf honed her public voice in dialogue with contemporaries in and beyond Bloomsbury― John Maynard Keynes and Roger Fry to Sigmund Freud (published by the Woolfs'Hogarth Press), Bertrand Russell, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and many others―and her works embody and illuminate the convergence of aesthetics and politics in post-Enlightenment thought. An ambitious history of her writings in relation to important currents in British intellectual life in the first half of the twentieth century, this book explores Virginia Woolf's narrative journey from her first novel, The Voyage Out , through her last, Between the Acts .

Genres: Literary Criticism, Biography, Literature, World War I

432 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 2004

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book. Approaches Woolf as an essential part of Bloomsbury, and at that a Bloomsbury which in no sense is a loose set of individuals lacking a common essence or sharing nothing but a random collection of family resemblance. Instead, Froula's Bloomsbury is powerfully united by a common project of drawing forth the idea of European civilization, one which has never entirely, or even appreciably, risen above barbarism. Consequently, the key intellectual figure guiding Froula's reading of Bloomsbury, and of course Woolf, is not Russell, Stephens, Keynes or Fry (all depicted as seminal figures for Woolf, in Anne Banfield's "The Phantom Table"), but rather Immanuel Kant. Whereas Kant might appears to Banfield to be too closely allied with Hegel, presented by her as the very antithesis of all things Bloomsbury, for Froula, Kant's conception of Enlightenment provides a central meeting places for the various members of Bloomsbury. Further, Kant furnishes Woolf with a paradigm of pure aesthetic experience, of the life of the mind lived exclusively on its own terms. Froula might well have played up the key force exerted upon Woolf by which Coleridge, an English disciple of Kant, for Woolf herself discusses as much in A Room of One's Own. But in following that more familiar line of influence Froula would have run the risk of keeping Woolf rooted in the same familiar English current of modernism which is so powerfully associated with T. S. Eliot. Whereas the direct tie back to Kant, which leaps over Coleridge, allows Froula to present a substantially different Woolf, one who is more broadly European than doggedly English, and one whose renewed image conforms quite felicitously with the Kantian formulations of current intellectual heavyweights such as Zizek.

[Ron Stafford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting Historiographical and social study of Bloomsbury. It is a good and informing read. I would have loved to been a part of it.