The Bloomsbury Group: Varieties of ethical experience (Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Ireland)

This dissertation is an introduction to and critical and historical assessment of the Bloomsbury Group's ethical origins and engagements. I examine the Bloomsburyans' ethical stances in their social and political contexts, employing a conceptual apparatus that poststructuralist ethical thinking affords and which in many ways the Bloomsburyans and their late-Victorian aestheticist forebears, like Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, anticipate. Through studies of the historical and philosophical origins of Bloomsbury's ethical aestheticism/aesthetic ethics, and of specific ways the Bloomsburyans applied their ethical beliefs in aesthetic and political arenas and in the space of modern mass culture, I complicate received assumptions about the Bloomsbury Group's revolt against Victorian moral codes and received wisdom about modernism's parricidal tendencies. Thus, this dissertation has broader relevance for modernist historiography, cultural and gender studies, and ethically valenced literary criticism. It contributes to current investigations into the ethics-politics nexus by elucidating some of the most significant and representative ways that this simultaneously very diverse yet unified group of friends and public intellectuals, with a lingering reputation as politically disengaged aesthetes, conceptualized their aesthetic and political activities in explicitly ethical terms-and their ethical thinking as a type of aesthetic and political struggle.