Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The modernist feminist writer Virginia Woolf lived and worked with a loose collective of writers, painters, and social thinkers that we call the "Bloomsbury Group," though many members of the group disliked the phrase. We will look at the novels, essays, art, and political writings of some of the members of Bloomsbury - Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey and others - to explore the complex moments of cross-fertilization, critique, and revision that define their encounters. In addition, we will attend to a few areas that have dominated discussions of Bloomsbury modernism: ideas of nation, "civilization," and critiques of Empire; the formation of literary modernism's often tense relation to mass culture; the development of modern discourses of sexuality; the relationship between literature and the modern metropolis; and explorations of women's "experience" of modernity. Because members of the Bloomsbury Group worked in a number of fields beyond the literary - painting, economics, social thought, publishing, and interior design to name a few - students will find that they can easily develop projects that engage more than one area of interest.