The Bloomsbury Group And The Victorian Age

The Bloomsbury Group,a collection of English writers,artists,intellectuals,philosophers,named after the neighbourhood of London they lived in.Of the Group,the best known members were Virginia Woolf,John Maynard Keynes,E.M.Forster,Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry.Their works and insights deeply influenced literature,aesthetics,criticism,and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism,pacifism,and sexuality.Though Bloomsbury strongly rebelled against the Victorian politics and values,it nevertheless inherited a lot from the Victorian Age.The thesis consists of four chapters:Chapter One firstly expatiates the origin,members,development and cultural character of the Bloomsbury Group;and illustrates the previous researches on the Bloomsbury Group and its main members such as Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey,as well as the purpose and methodology of the study.Chapter Two expounds the influence of the Victorian Age on the Bloomsbury Group from two aspects--Bloomsbury's rebellion against the Victorian politics and values and its intellectual inheritance of the Victorian Age,literary and philosophical education in Cambridge,and Leslie Stephen's influence on the Group and its members.Chapter Three illustrates contradictory attitudes of the Bloomsbury Group towards the Victorian Age by analyzing Virginia Woolf's and Lytton Strachey's works.The chapter consists of two sections.The first section is an analysis ofVirginia Woolf's complex attitudes towards the Victorian past reflected in her works:Mrs Dalloway,To the Lighthouse,and Night and Day.The second section is an analysis of Lytton Strachey's complex attitudes towards the Victorian past in his Eminent Victorians and autobiography.Chapter Four is the conclusion part.The thesis draws a conclusion that the Bloomsbury Group's rebellion against and inheritance from the Victorian past reveal its ambivalence of repulsion and reminiscence towards the Victorian Age.