Regina Marler

Celebrated and maligned with equal vigor, the Bloomsbury Group is the best-documented artistic coterie in twentieth-century literature. The novelists Virgonia Woolf and E.M. Forster, the artists Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell, and the economist John Maynard Keynes were among this charmed circle that emerged in London before the First World War and came to exercise a complex, lingering influence on English art and letters. Theirs was a world of great talent--even genius--sexual intrigue, and gossip; they cultivated an atmosphere in which it was possible to say anything, do anything. Their peak of influence in the 1920s was followed by forty years of sustained sidelong derogation, and occasional frontal attack, from such famously hostile critics as D.H. Larence and Wyndham Lewis, until, in the 1960s, the idea of Bloomsbury exploded in the public imagination, transforming the Group into an almost mass-market attraction. Not in their darkest nightmares could Bloomsbury's contemporary detractors have imagined that Charleston Farmhouse, where Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant once lived and painted, would eventually attract some 15,000 visitors each year, or that a high-profile film, Carrington, would be based on Lytton Strachey's largely platonic love affair with an obscure artist on the fringes of the hallowed Group. Bloomsbury Pie examines the persistent allure of Bloomsbury--a fascination driven by nostalgia, adoration, and antipathy--and tracks the resurgence of interest in the Group, from a handful of biographies in the 1960s through the feminist discovery of Virginia Woolf in the 1970s and the enshrinement of the Bloomsberries as cultural icons in the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on a wealth of material generated by this revival, Regina Marler chronicles the story of the Bloomsbury boom--its scholars, collectors, and fanatics and explores the industry it has spawned among writers, publishers, and art dealers. In the proces she creates an impressive social history of a tenacious and unwieldy cultural phenomenon.

The Making Of The Bloomsbury Boom

Bloomsbury Pie

Vanessa Bell

The daughter of eminent Victorian writer Sir Leslie Stephen and older sister of Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell was a well-known avant-garde painter and decorator, and a central figure in the Bloomsbury group. The collection, including many of Vanessa daily letters to her children, sister, and her lovers, takes readers from 1885 to 1961 - through more than seventy years and two world wars. Together they document Vanessa's fascinating and often romantic relationship with her sister; her domestic and aesthetic life at various houses including Gordon Square, Asheham, Cassis and Charleston; and her passionate involvements with Rodger Fry and Duncan Grant - who himself would have had an affair with the writer David Bunny Garnett, future husband of Duncan and Vanessa daughter, Angelica.

Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell

The writings that shocked America out of the 1950s Blasting through the crew-cuts and conformism of their day, the Beat writers were queer in the fullest sense of the word: their fluid sexuality challenged all sexual and romantic conventions. Most shocking of their unconventional attitudes was their embrace of same-sex eroticism. At a time when gay people were considered mentally ill or criminal, the Beats celebrated spontaneity and freedom in thought, word, and action. Their highest value was nakedness—even before Allen Ginsberg stripped bare at a poetry reading to silence a heckler. They would try anything once, then write about it. Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex traces, for the first time, the queer pulse that throbs throughout the Beats' writings—from William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch and Allen Ginsberg's wistful, boy-loving sex poems to Jack Kerouac's hero-worship of Neal Cassady—and Kerouac's denial of having sex with men, despite erotic encounters with Ginsberg and Gore Vidal: "Posterity will laugh at me if it thinks I was queer."

How the Beats Turned America On to Sex

Queer Beats

Surveying fiction, poetry, and letters from the Beat writers, this introduction to the sexual reverberations created by this literary movement in the 1940s and 1950s reveals how gay writers were often the people encouraging sexual freedom and experimentation during this period. Original.

Regina Marler

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