The Bloomsbury revolt : the shift in literary and aesthetic perspective

Abstract

Four years ago, when I was required to submit a dissertation as part-fulfilment of my BA degree, I became fascinated, and eventually obsessed, with Virginia Woolf. She was intriguing both as a writer as well as a person, because her extraordinary life was as captivating as her brilliant work. For this reason, in that first dissertation I decided to prove how Woolf s life and her fiction were inextricably linked; the recurring biographical elements in her novels were too obvious to be ignored. As I was writing that dissertation, Virginia Woolf introduced me to the fantastic and amazing world of the Bloomsbury Group. Her companions were as invigorating, as cheeky, and as witty as she was, and in unison they brought about significant changes especially in the literary and mystic worlds. Though the members of Bloomsbury experimented within various fields, I got the strong impression that they were especially concerned with art and literature. Together and individually, Bloomsbury members worked to propose new ideas of how one could go about producing works of mi. What I found especially admirable in Bloomsbury was the fact that, despite the adverse response they got from the general public of the time, they persevered relentlessly to drive their point home. They sincerely believed that both the art and the literature that was being produced at the beginning of the twentieth century was in desperate need of renewal and that it could be taken to a superior level.