“Democratic Highbrow”: Bloomsbury between Élite and Mass Culture

Authors

Marina Lops; Antonella Trotta; Flora de Giovanni; Francesca Orestano; Rossana Bonadei; Maria Teresa Chialant; Claudio Zambianchi; Todd Avery; Benedetta Guerrini degl’Innocenti; Nicola Wilson; Ilaria Andreoli; Salvatore Bizzarro; Gerardo Salvati; Francesca Manes Rossi; Alessandra Allini; Riccardo Macchioni

Synopsis

With its fluid boundaries, the Bloomsbury Group was first and foremost a circle of friends who shared a similar social background and progressive political views. Named after the small neighbourhood in London where some of its members settled as young adults, the Group included some of the leading artists and writers of the interwar period – from Virginia Woolf to E. M. Forster, from Vanessa to Clive Bell, from Roger Fry to Lytton Strachey, among others – as well as John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century. Variously considered an elitist coterie and a democratic avant-garde, the Group not only left behind an intellectual legacy as impressive as it was diverse, but also introduced a new way of living and working that helped to mark a definitive break with Victorian tradition and paved the way to modernity in British culture. Privileging a multidisciplinary perspective encompassing literature and cultural history, history of art and economics, this volume explores the protean and multifarious identity of Bloomsbury, celebrated by some as an intellectual authority and denigrated by others as an eccentric circle that “lived in squares and loved in triangles”.

Chapters

Bloomsbury between Élite and Mass Culture
A Selective Introduction

Marina Lops, Antonella Trotta

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Citizens of the Bloomsbury Nation

Flora de Giovanni

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Virginia Woolf and the Art of Cooking

Francesca Orestano

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In Wireless Conversation
Bloomsbury and the Radio Days

Rossana Bonadei

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Poets, Empire-builders and Proles
Class Conflict and England’s Destiny in E. M. Forster’s Howards End

Maria Teresa Chialant

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From the Grafton Galleries to the Armory Show
Roger Fry’s Influence in Britain and the U.S. (ca. 1910-1913)

Claudio Zambianchi

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A Mandarin for the Masses
Lytton Strachey’s Jesus Complex

Todd Avery

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“England belonged to them”
Edward Carpenter and Forster’s “Utopia” of Masculine Love in Maurice

Marina Lops

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“A house full with unrelated passions”
Bloomsbury and Psychoanalysis

Benedetta Guerrini degl’Innocenti

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Bloomsbury, the Hogarth Press, and the Book Society Limited

Nicola Wilson

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Bloomsbury in Print
Book Illustrations from the Omega Workshops and the Hogarth Press

Ilaria Andreoli

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Why Do They Go to the Pictures? Clive Bell and the New “Home” Audience

Antonella Trotta

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The Meaning of Pictures
Roger Fry on the Radio

Salvatore Bizzarro

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Virginia Woolf, the Dandy and the BBC

Gerardo Salvati

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The Territorial Report as an Accountability Tool
A Proposal for Bloomsbury

Francesca Manes Rossi, Alessandra Allini, Riccardo Macchioni

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