1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910817461803321

Autore

Froula Christine <1950->

Titolo

Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury avant-garde : war, civilization, modernity / / Christine Froula

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, : Columbia University Press, c2005

ISBN

0-231-50878-6

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (812 p.)

Collana

Gender and culture

Disciplina

823/.912

Soggetti

World War, 1914-1918 - Literature and the war - England - London

Women and literature - England - London - History - 20th century

Experimental fiction, English - History and criticism

Avant-garde (Aesthetics) - England - London

Modernism (Literature) - England - London

Civilization, Modern, in literature

Bloomsbury group

Bloomsbury (London, England) Intellectual life 20th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- List of Abbreviations -- Preface -- 1. Civilization and "my civilisation" -- 2. Rachel's Great War -- 3. The Death of Jacob Flanders -- 4. Mrs. Dalloway's Postwar Elegy -- 5. Picture the World -- 6. A Fin in a Waste of Waters -- 7. The Sexual Life of Women -- 8. St. Virginia's Epistle to an English Gentleman -- 9. The Play in the Sky of the Mind -- Notes -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

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 Europe: 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 Woolf's '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.