The avant-garde of early-twentieth-century London quietly met and conspired in a tight-knit, eclectic circle known as the Bloomsbury Group. For these writers, artists, and thinkers, the common denominators were a contempt for traditional morality, a rejection of artistic convention, and a... [more]

The avant-garde of early-twentieth-century London quietly met and conspired in a tight-knit, eclectic circle known as the Bloomsbury Group. For these writers, artists, and thinkers, the common denominators were a contempt for traditional morality, a rejection of artistic convention, and a disdain for bourgeois sexual mores. Named for their regular meetings in the London university quarter around Bloomsbury Square, their reputation as radical thinkers was founded on the revolutionary stream-of-consciousness prose style developed by Virginia Woolf, as well as the iconoclastic, pacifist philosophical musings of Bertrand Russell. Were the Bloomsbury thinkers snobs? Perhaps. Were they just a bit precious in their elitist, upper-middle-class emphasis on the leisured life of the ivory-tower artist-intellectual? Probably. Were they justified in their assumption that their work was important? Absolutely. Though they were a small coterie, the long arm of their literary and creative experiments reached far ahead of them. Bloomsbury members virtually defined the social, political, and creative preoccupations of the coming mid-century: unconventional sexual practices; anti-war sentiments and socialism; and the fragmenting, multiperspective aesthetics of both the Modern and Postmodern eras. They provided the definitive twentieth-century interpretation of la vie boheme, influencing such disparate later artistic movements as the Algonquin Round Table, the Surrealists, and the Beats. [show less]