Bloomsbury Group

Bloomsbury Group
a group of artists and writers who met regularly as friends in Bloomsbury, London, in the early 20th century. They rejected Victorian(2) attitudes and believed in art, friendship and social progress. They included many of the leading figures of the time, such as Virginia Woolf, E M Forster, Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey.

* * *

A coterie of English writers, philosophers, and artists.

The name was a reference to the Bloomsbury district of London, where between about 1907 and 1930 the group frequently met to discuss aesthetic and philosophical questions. Among the group were E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, the painters Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) and Duncan Grant (1885–1978), John Maynard Keynes, the Fabian writer Leonard Woolf (1880–1969), and Virginia Woolf.

* * *

▪ English artists circle
 name given to a coterie of English writers, philosophers, and artists who frequently met between about 1907 and 1930 at the houses of Clive (Bell, Clive) and Vanessa Bell and of Vanessa's brother and sister Adrian and Virginia Stephen (later Virginia Woolf (Woolf, Virginia)) in the Bloomsbury district of London, the area around the British Museum. They discussed aesthetic and philosophical questions in a spirit of agnosticism and were strongly influenced by G.E. Moore (Moore, G E)'s Principia Ethica (1903) and by A.N. Whitehead (Whitehead, Alfred North)'s and Bertrand Russell (Russell, Bertrand)'s Principia Mathematica (1910–13), in the light of which they searched for definitions of the good, the true, and the beautiful and questioned accepted ideas with a “comprehensive irreverence” for all kinds of sham.

      Nearly all the male members of the group had been at Trinity or King's College, Cambridge, with Leslie Stephen's son Thoby, who had introduced them to his sisters Vanessa and Virginia. Most of them had been “Apostles”; i.e., members of the “society,” a select, semisecret university club for the discussion of serious questions, founded at Cambridge in the late 1820s by J.F.D. Maurice and John Sterling. Tennyson, Arthur Hallam, Edward Fitzgerald, and Leslie Stephen had all been Apostles. In the early 1900s, when those who later formed the core of the Bloomsbury group were elected to the society, the literary critic Lowes Dickinson, the philosophers Henry Sidgwick, J.M.E. McTaggart, A.N. Whitehead, G.E. Moore, and the art critic Roger Fry (Fry, Roger), who became one of the Bloomsbury group himself, were members.

      The Bloomsbury group included the novelist E.M. Forster (Forster, E M), the biographer Lytton Strachey (Strachey, Lytton), the art critic Clive Bell, the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant (Grant, Duncan), the economist John Maynard Keynes (Keynes, John Maynard), the Fabian writer Leonard Woolf (Woolf, Leonard), and the novelist and critic Virginia Woolf. Other members were Desmond Macarthy, Arthur Waley, Saxon Sidney-Turner, Robert Trevelyan, Francis Birrell, J.T. Sheppard (later provost of King's College), and the critic Raymond Mortimer and the sculptor Stephen Tomlin, both Oxford men. Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, and T.S. Eliot were sometimes associated with the group, as was the economist Gerald Shove. The group survived World War I but by the early 1930s had ceased to exist in its original form, having by that time merged with the general intellectual life of London, Oxford, and Cambridge. Although its members shared certain ideas and values, the Bloomsbury group did not constitute a school. Its significance lies in the extraordinary number of talented persons associated with it.

* * *


Universalium. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Нужно решить контрольную?

Look at other dictionaries:

  • Bloomsbury group —   [ bluːmzbərɪ gruːp], nach dem Londoner Stadtteil Bloomsbury benannter Freundeskreis englischer Verleger (Leonard Woolf, * 1880, ✝ 1969), Schriftsteller und Kritiker (Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell, * 1881, ✝ 1964, Roger Fry, D. Garnett, G. L.… …   Universal-Lexikon

  • Bloomsbury Group — Bloomsbury Group, the a group of artists and writers who lived and met each other regularly in Bloomsbury in the early part of the 20th century. The most famous member of the group was Virginia Woolf …   Dictionary of contemporary English

  • Bloomsbury Group — The Bloomsbury Group was an English collectivity of loving friends and relatives who lived in or near London during the first half of the twentieth century. Their work deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as… …   Wikipedia

  • Bloomsbury Group —  Pour l’article homonyme, voir Bloomsbury.  Les membres du Bloomsbury Group Le Bloomsbury Group ou simplement Bloomsbury est un groupe qui réunit un certain nombre d artistes et d intellectuels …   Wikipédia en Français

  • Bloomsbury Group — Vanessa Bell, Porträt von Roger Fry, 1916 Virginia Woolf im Jahr 1902. Fo …   Deutsch Wikipedia

  • Bloomsbury Group — /ˈblumzbri grup/ (say bloohmzbree groohp) noun a group of literary, artistic and intellectual friends, meeting in Bloomsbury, London, about 1906–30, including EM Forster, Virginia Woolf and JM Keynes …  

  • Bloomsbury Group — noun an inner circle of writers and artists and philosophers who lived in or around Bloomsbury early in the 20th century and were noted for their unconventional lifestyles • Hypernyms: ↑clique, ↑coterie, ↑ingroup, ↑inner circle, ↑pack, ↑camp •… …   Useful english dictionary

  • Bloomsbury Group, the — Blooms|bur|y Group, the [ blumzb(ə)ri ,grup ] a group of writers and artists, including Virginia Woolf, who lived and worked in the early part of the 20th century …   Usage of the words and phrases in modern English

  • (the) Bloomsbury Group — the Bloomsbury Group UK [ˈbluːmzb(ə)ri ˌɡruːp] US [ˈblumzb(ə)ri ˌɡrup] Etymology From ‘Bloomsbury’, an area of central London where the group regularly met. a group of writers and artists, including Virginia Woolf, who lived and worked in the… …   Useful english dictionary

  • Bloomsbury (disambiguation) — Bloomsbury may refer to:* Bloomsbury, an area in central London. * the Bloomsbury Group, an English literary group active around from around 1905 to the start of World War II. * the Bloomsbury Gang, a political grouping centred on the local… …   Wikipedia

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”