The Bloomsbury Group has always held an ambiguous status in literary and art historical accounts of "high modernism." Hugh Kenner, for example, in his 1984 article, "The Making of the Modernist Canon," argues that modernism is best understood as "a supranational movement called International Modernism" which was "the work of Irishmen and Americans." Virginia Woolf, he says, "is not part of International Modernism; she is an English novelist of manners writing village gossip from a village called Bloomsbury for her English readers."
However, recent revaluations and redefinitions of literary modernism have begun to complicate our understanding of the field. It is possible to understand modernism less as an aesthetic movement than as a complex historical formation which evoked a wide variety of cultural responses and interventions. Recent work, most of it focussing on American literary culture, has deepened our understanding of the geographical, historical and material locatedness of various forms of modernism.
The roots of one form of English modernism can be traced to a loose affiliation of late nineteenth-century movements which I am calling "progressive idealism." Progressive idealism had affinities to slightly earlier movements like romantic utopianism and to concurrent movements like ethical socialism and guild socialism. Issues taken up by progressive idealists included: simplicity of living, class relations, domestic life, communal living, education of the young, spiritualism and psychical research, land nationalization, feminism, vegetarianism, sexuality, and relations between men and women. Distinguished in part by its intellectual indebtedness to American thinkers and writers like Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, as well as by its reading of Marx, Ibsen, and Goethe, progressive idealism emphasized both individualism and fellowship.
In this course, we will read some representative works of English modernism against some representative texts of progressive idealism, together with additional background material. The following list of texts is both partial and tentative, and is intended only to give a sense of the kind of material we will be reading. Course assignments and the weighting of grades will be negotiated at the first class meeting.
Some "modernist" works: Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure (1895) Shaw, G. B. Major Barbara (1905, pub. 1907) Forster, E. M. Howard's End (1910) Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse (1927) Lawrence, D. H. Lady Chatterley's Lover (priv. printed 1928)Some "progressive idealist" works: Carpenter, Edward. Towards Democracy (1883-1902) Ellis, Mrs. Havelock (Edith), selected short stories and lectures Morris, William. News from Nowhere (1891) Nesbit, E. Ballads and Lyrics of Socialism, 1883-1908 (1908) Schreiner, Olive. Stories, Dreams and Allegories (1923)
Some secondary readings: