Description:
Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde traces Woolf's art and thought in dialogue with Bloomsbury, Britain's modern heir to the unfinished Enlightenment project of human rights, democratic self-governance, and world peace. For Bloomsbury the 1914 "civil war" exposed barbarity within European civilization-belligerent nationalism, racialized economic imperialism, oppressive class and sex/gender systems-the Versailles Peace fostered totalitarianism and led to a second world war. An avant-garde in the struggle against the violence within, Bloomsbury contributed richly to interwar debates as liberal democracy, socialism, fascism, and communism contended over Europe's future.
From her first novel, The Voyage Out, to her last, Between the Acts, Woolf honed her public voice alongside Bloomsbury contemporaries John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield and others. An ambitious analysis of Woolf's major writings in light of the historical conditions to which they respond, this volume illuminates the convergence of aesthetics and politics in post-Enlightenment thought and opens a new chapter in Woolf studies.
Review Quotes: Froula's book brims with fresh historical and political insights... [Her] book is crucial.--Julia Keller "Chicago Tribune"