On or about 1901: The Bloomsbury Group Looks Back at the Victorians

• Published in: Victorian studies Vol. 46; no. 4; pp. 631 - 654
• Main Author: Joyce, Simon
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bloomington Indiana University Press 22-06-2004
• Subjects: Anxiety; Autobiographies; Bell, Clive (1881-1964); Bloom, Harold (1930-2019); Bourgeois; English history; Historical text analysis; Honesty; Irony; Literary criticism; Literary style; Modernist art; Novelists; Orthodoxy; Sowing; Transitions; Victorian literature; Victorian period; Victorians; Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941); Writing
• ISSN: 0042-5222; 1527-2052
• DOI: 10.2979/VIC.2004.46.4.631

With the turn into a new century and millennium, a number of critical texts have offered up a reexamination of the defining characteristics and legacies of the Victorian period. Joyce points out the irony that people seem only to be able to restore to the Victorians a sense of their heterogeneity by asserting and denigrating a monolithic "Bloomsbury" outlook, one that flies in the face of the Group's own repeated denials of a collective viewpoint and also--not incidentally--looks very much like another instance of Bloomian anxiety. He rethinks what leading Bloomsbury figures--Stachey, the Woolfs, and Clive Bell--had to say about the preceding century to see if those accounts might also be viewed as heterogeneous and diverse.