Love, Friendship, and Narrative Form After Bloomsbury: The Progress of Intimacy in History

The book explores how the Bloomsbury Groups cutting-edge thinkers understood the intimacy of friends, lovers, spouses, and families as historically unfolding phenomena, offering a compelling account of modernisms legacies in contemporary fiction and demonstrating the myriad ways in which intimacy was a guiding and persistent idea explored by writers across the 20th-century and up to the present day.

Format: Hardback
Length: 272 pages
Publication date: 12 January 2023
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

The Bloomsbury Groups cutting-edge thinkers—Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, and E. M. Forster—understood the intimacy of friends, lovers, spouses, and families as historically unfolding phenomena, offering a compelling account of modernisms legacies in contemporary fiction and demonstrating the myriad ways in which intimacy was a guiding and persistent idea explored by writers across the 20th-century and up to the present day. Often modernists have been celebrated for their insights into social and civilizational sickness, but this book unearths a strain of modernist thought that is more complex and inspiring than this. It discusses how Bloomsburys thinkers wrestled with the question "Does intimate life improve?" as sexual egalitarianism expands, as taboos against same-sex love, interracial love, and singlehood wane, and as parents and children relate less formally and often more warmly toward one another. And it discusses how many of todays major novelists, such as Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, and Rachel Cusk, look to Bloomsburys thematic and formal examples when they reformulate this question for our time.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781350328822