Love, Friendship, and Narrative Form After Bloomsbury

- Blurb -

Exploring how the Bloomsbury Group' s cutting-edge thinkers-Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, and E. M. Forster-understood the intimacy of friends, lovers, spouses, and families as historically unfolding phenomena, this book offers a compelling account of modernism' s legacies in contemporary fiction and demonstrates 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 Bloomsbury' s 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 today' s major novelists, such as Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan and Rachel Cusk, look to Bloomsbury' s thematic and formal examples when they reformulate this question for our time.