An in-depth study of how the famed Bloomsbury Group expressed their liberal philosophies and collective identity in visual form "[Fascinating and wide-ranging. . . . Will be enjoyed by both Bloomsbury aficionados and newcomers alike."--Lucinda Willan, V&A Magazine The Bloomsbury Group was a loose collective of forward-thinking writers, artists, and intellectuals in London, with Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and E. M. Forster among its esteemed members. The group's works and radical beliefs, spanning literature, economics, politics, and non-normative relationships, changed the course of 20th-century culture and society. Although its members resisted definition, their art and dress imparted a coherent, distinctive group identity. Drawing on unpublished photographs and extensive new research, The Bloomsbury Look is the first in-depth analysis of how the Bloomsbury Group generated and broadcast its self-fashioned aesthetic. One chapter is dedicated to photography, which was essential to the group's visual narrative--from casual snapshots, to amateur studio portraits, to family albums. Others examine the Omega Workshops as a design center, and the evidence for its dress collections, spreading the Bloomsbury aesthetic to the general public. Finally, the book considers the group's extensive participation in 20th-century modernism as artists, models, curators, critics, and collectors.

The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group is the most comprehensive available survey of contemporary scholarship on the Bloomsbury Group – the set of influential writers, artists and thinkers whose members included Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant and David Garnett. With chapters written by world leading scholars in the field, the book explores novel avenues of thinking about these pivotal figures and their works opened up by the new modernist studies. It brings together overview essays with detailed illustrative case studies, and covers topics as diverse as feminism, sexuality, empire, philosophy, class, nature and the arts. Setting the agenda for future study of Bloomsbury, this is an essential resource for scholars of 20th-century modernist culture.

This volume features new essays by eminent and emerging Woolf scholars, focusing on the aesthetics and influences of Virginia Woolf's work. Themes include eco-criticism, conceptions of intellectual women, spaces and places, and Woolf beyond Bloomsbury. The volume opens with a personal reflection by Cecil Woolf, nephew of Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

The first collection to bring together contemporary and classic writings on queer BloomsburyThis anthology presents important early essays that laid the foundation for queer studies of the Bloomsbury Group together with new essays that build upon this foundation to provide ground-breaking work on Bloomsbury figures and cultural achievements. As a whole, Queer Bloomsbury stands alone as a wide-ranging and critical resource that traces the cultural, ideological, and aesthetic facets of Bloomsbury's development as a queer intellectual and aesthetic subculture. Key FeaturesFifteen wide-ranging readings that trace the cultural, ideological, and aesthetic facets of Bloomsbury's development as a queer subcultureIncludes Carolyn Heilbrun's influential essay on the sexual dissidence of the Bloomsbury Group with an introduction by scholar Brenda SilverMoves beyond LGBT studies of Bloomsbury to provide substantive information on the queer philosophical and ethical underpinnings of the Bloomsbury GroupRarely seen reproductions of Duncan Grant's work from the Charleston archives as well as Dora Carrington's work from archives and a private collection

Provides a comprehensive guide to the storied Bloomsbury Group, a social circle of prominent intellectuals active during the interwar period.

Photographs, some barely known, on the domestic lives of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) and the historical, cultural and artistic milieux of their circle in Bloomsbury, including Vivienne Eliot, Vita Sackville-West, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Dora Carrington.

The New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield associated intimately with many members of the Bloomsbury group, but her literary aesthetics placed her at a distance from the artistic works of the group. With chapters written by leading international scholars, Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group explores this conflicted relationship. Bringing together biographical and critical studies, the book examines Mansfield's relationships – personal and literary – with such major Modernist figures as Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and Walter de la Mare as well as the ways in which her work engaged with and reacted against Bloomsbury. In this way the book reveals the true extent of Mansfield's wider influence on 20th-century modernist writing.

An “illuminating” (Daily Mail, London) exploration of the second generation of the iconic Bloomsbury Group who inspired their elders to new heights of creativity and passion while also pushing the boundaries of sexual freedom and gender norms in 1920s England. In the years before the First World War, a collection of writers and artists—Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey among them—began to make a name for themselves in England and America for their irreverent spirit and provocative works of literature, art, and criticism. They called themselves the Bloomsbury Group and by the 1920s, they were at the height of their influence. Then a new generation stepped forward—creative young people who tantalized their elders with their captivating looks, bold ideas, and subversive energy. Young Bloomsbury introduces us to this colorful cast of characters, including novelist Eddy Sackville-West, who wore elaborate make-up and dressed in satin and black velvet; artist Stephen Tomlin, who sculpted the heads of his male and female lovers; and author Julia Strachey, who wrote a searing tale of blighted love. Talented and productive, these larger-than-life figures had high-achieving professional lives and extremely complicated emotional lives. The group had always celebrated sexual equality and freedom in private, feeling that every person had the right to live and love in the way they chose. But as transgressive self-expression became more public, this younger generation gave Old Bloomsbury a new voice. Revealing an aspect of history not yet explored and with “effervescent detail” (Juliet Nicolson, author of Frostquake), Young Bloomsbury celebrates an open way of living and loving that would not be embraced for another hundred years.

This study explores the role of fiction in the social production of the West Central district of London in the nineteenth century. It tells a new history of the novel from a local geographical perspective, tracing developments in the form as it engaged with Bloomsbury in the period it emerged as the city’s dominant literary zone. A neighbourhood that was subject simultaneously to socio-economic decline and cultural ascent, fiction set in Bloomsbury is shown to have reconceived the area’s marginality as potential autonomy. Drawing on sociological theory, this book critically historicizes Bloomsbury’s trajectory to show that its association with the intellectual “fraction” known as the ‘Bloomsbury Group’ at the beginning of the twentieth century was symptomatic rather than exceptional. From the 1820s onwards, writers positioned themselves socially within the metropolitan geography they projected through their fiction. As Bloomsbury became increasingly identified with the cultural capital of writers rather than the economic capital of established wealth, writers subtly affiliated themselves with the area, and the figure of the writer and Bloomsbury became symbolically conflated.

Based on hitherto overlooked archival material, this book reveals Nell Walden’s significant impact on the Sturm organisation through a feminist reading of supportive labour that highlights the centrality of collaborative work within the modern art world. This book introduces Walden as an ardent collector of modern and indigenous art and critically contextualises her own art production in relation to expressionist concepts of art and to gendered ideas on abstraction and decoration. Visual analyses highlight how she collaborated with professional and experimental women photographers during the Weimar era and how the circulation of these photographs served as a means to intervene in the public sphere of culture in interwar Germany. Finally, the book provides an analysis of Walden’s continuing work for Der Sturm after her voluntary exile from Germany to Switzerland in 1933 and highlights the importance of women’s supportive labour for the canonisation and institutionalisation of modern art in museums and archives. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, and gender studies.