English-language literary Modernism.

The Bloomsbury group’s activity.

V. Woolf’s work
1. English-language literary Modernism: its origins, characteristics, genre
system, and literary experiments.
2. The Bloomsbury group’s activity.
3. The typology of the modernist novel in English.
4. Virginia Woolf as a theorist of the modernist novel.
5. The fictional writing of V. Woolf: the aesthetic principles.
6. The peculiarities of V. Woolf’s psychological novels.
 Literary Modernism in English

 At its height from 1900 to 1940 (the 1920-30ies are considered the
decades of High Modernism)
 Main representatives:
James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot,
Ezra Pound, William B. Yeats, H.D. (Hilda Dolittle), Gertrude Stein,
Wyndham Lewis
 What united these writers was
(1) a distrust of the Victorian positivism and certainty
(2) the rejection of the machine age and the focus on eternal aspects
of being
(3) an attempt to explain irrational thought processes, the focus on the
inner world of the individual
(4) formal experiments
 MODERNISM can be treated as an innovative trend in the
development of the 20th-century art.
 It included the progressive art and architecture, music,
literature and design, encouraging the re-examination of every
aspect of human existence.
 Modernism was stimulated by new ideas in anthropology,
psychology, philosophy (“life philosophy”), political theory,
and psychoanalysis.
 In the arts and letters, three ideas would have a particular
impact on Modernism arising:
(1) Impressionism
(2) Symbolism
(3) Aestheticism.
 Characteristic features of literary MODERNISM:

1. Modernism rejects the principles and devices of Realism and Naturalism.

2. Modernism emphasises freedom of expression and radical experimentation
with literary forms and techniques.
3. Modernism claims the prevalence of form over the content (meaningful
form).
4. Modernism is considered to be the art of educated elite.
5. Modernism features a marked pessimism in the perception of the outer world,
which is often deformed and absurd in their works. A common motif is that
of an alienated self.
6. Modernists focus on the individual rather than the social.
7. Modernists investigate the inner world (person’s feelings,
emotions, passions).
8. Modernists render reality through individual’s consciousness.
9. Their characters are not socially determined; they are not
social types but individuals.
10. Modernists ruin the conventional elements of composition:
their works lack plot and dynamics of action.
Formal characteristics of Modernism:

 Open form, open final

 Non-linear, fragmented narration
 Cyclic structure
 Intertextuality (literary, philosophical, and historical
allusions and references)
 Borrowings from other cultures and languages
 GENRE SYSTEM of MODERNISM:

Drama: drama-myth – W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot

Poetry: mythopoeic poem – T.S. Eliot
landscape and philosophical poetry – Ezra Pound,
T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, H.D., R. Aldington, D.H. Lawrence
Short-story: psychological short-story – Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence
Novel: mythopoeic (mythological) novel – J. Joyce
psychological novel – V. Woolf, J. Joyce, D.H. Lawrence
novel of ideas – A. Huxley, J. Joyce
erotic novel – D.H. Lawrence
Bildungsroman (novel of formation) – Joyce, Lawrence
anti-utopian novel – A. Huxley
 The Bloomsbury Group

 The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, artists, scholars, philosophers,
historians, journalists and economists that existed from around 1905 until around World War II.
 Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism and economics as well as
modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality.
 The members of the group questioned accepted ideas and strongly rejected the Victorian and Edwardian
eras’ strictures on religious, artistic, social, and sexual issues.
 They considered art to be the most important aspect of life, the highest expression of human abilities and
a necessary condition for the existence of civilization.
 Major representatives: Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, Duncan
Grant, Vanessa Bell, John M. Keynes, Edward M. Forster, Desmond MacCarthy, Bertrand Russell, and
Thoby Stephen.
 Clive Bell (1881–1964), British artist and art critic
 Bell was one of the founders of the formalist theory
of art, elevating the concept of form above content in
works of art.
 Works: Art (1914), Civilization (1928), Since
Cézanne (1922), Proust (1929).

Vanessa Bell (1879 -

1961), British painter and
designer
Lytton Strachey (1880–1932), British essayist, biographer and critic
 Strachey is best known for establishing a new form of biography in which
psychological insight is combined with wit:
• collection of four short biographies of Victorians entitled
“Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold,
General Gordon” (1918)
• biography “Queen Victoria” (1921).
 His other works include: “Books and Characters” (1922), “Elizabeth and Essex: A
Tragic History” (1928), “Portraits in Miniature and Other Essays” (1931)

Leonard Woolf (1880–1969), British writer, publisher and civil servant

Novels: The Village in the Jungle (1913), The Wise Virgins (1914)
Works: International Government (1916), Cooperation and
the Future of Industry (1918), Socialism and Co-operation (1921),
Fear and Politics (1925), Essays on Literature, History, Politics (1927), Imperialism
and Civilization (1928), Barbarians At The Gate (1939), The War for Peace (1940).
Roger Fry (1866–1934), British artist and art critic
 According to Fry, art does not bear moral responsibility; it is a
sphere of pure creativity.
Works: Vision and Design (1920), Transformations (1926),
Cézanne. A Study of His Development (1927), Henri Matisse Self-portrait
(1930), French Art (1932), Reflections on British Painting (1934).
Keynes

The Bloomsbury Group also included: MacCarthy

 the canvas painter Duncan Grant,

 the economist John Maynard Keynes, called
the father of macroeconomics,
 the theatre critic, journalist and editor
Desmond MacCarthy,
 the philosopher Bertrand Russell (“The
History of Western Philosophy”),
Duncan Grant, Self-
portrait
 the novelist E.M. Forster.
Russell
Edward M. Forster (1879–1970), British novelist, short-story
writer, and essayist
Novels:
 1905 – “Where Angels Fear to Tread” portrays the insensitivity,
self-repression, and philistinism of the English middle classes.
 1907 – “The Longest Trip”, an inverted Bildungsroman following
the lame Rickie Elliott from Cambridge to a career as a struggling writer.
 1908 – “A Room with a View”, the story of young Lucy Honeychurch’s trip to Italy with her cousin,
and the choice she must make between the free-thinking George Emerson, and the repressed
aesthete Cecil Vyse.
 1910 – “Howards End”, a condition of England novel concerned with different groups within the
Edwardian middle classes.
 1924 – “A Passage to India”, most-acclaimed novel about the relationship between East and West,
seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj.
 1971 – “Maurice” (written 1913-1914) narrates a homosexual love story.

Literary criticism: “Aspects of the Novel” (1927), The Feminine Note in Literature (2001).
 British novelist,
short-story writer,
theorist and
literary critic

(1882 – 1941)
 LITERARY CAREER:
Three stages in literary evolution:
1. Novels: The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), Jacob’s Room (1922)
Collection of short stories: Monday or Tuesday (1919), a collection of eight
short stories including: ‘A Haunted House’, ‘A Society’, ‘Monday or Tuesday’,
‘An Unwritten Novel’, ‘The String Quartet’, ‘Blue & Green’, ‘The Mark on the Wall’.
2. Novels: Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927)
Literary biographies: Orlando: A Biography (1928)
Non-fiction: The Common Reader (1925); A Room of One’s Own (1929)
3. Novels: The Waves (1931), The Years (1937), Between the Acts (1941)
Literary biographies: Flush: A Biography (1933), Roger Fry: A Biography (1940)
Non-fiction: The Second Common Reader (1933), Three Guineas (1938).

4. Posthumous publications include: The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942),

A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (1944), and
The Moment and Other Essays (1948).
Major themes raised in criticism:
 reading process as constructing the book for oneself
(“The Common Reader”)
 economic independence of women, the problem of women’s access to
the learned professions, the consequences of a male-dominated society,
women’s struggles as artists, their position in literary history (“A Room
of One’s Own” )
 pacifism (“Three Guineas”)
 literary process and modern fiction, the significance of form
(formalism) and character’s inner world (“Mr. Bennett and
Mrs. Brown”, “Modern Fiction”).
 Virginia Woolf as a novelist

 Woolf worked within the genre of the psychological novel, where the emphasis is not on
the plot or action but on the psychological life of the character.
 Woolf made considerable use of the stream of consciousness technique, attempting to
record the flow of thoughts and feelings.
 Woolf rejected the traditional framework of narrative, description and rational exposition
in prose.
 Themes in her novels include:
gender relations, the role of women in the British society, the consequences of war, the
problem of self-identity, personal relationships, and the significance of time, change, and
memory on the individual.
 Symbols are very important in Woolf’s writings: ocean (water), butterfly, flowers.