Love, Friendship, and Narrative Form After Bloomsbury

Jesse Wolfe’s important new book offers a convincing reconsideration of the Bloomsbury Group’s impact on the contemporary novel and, more broadly, on the freedom to live and love in fulfilling ways. Love, Friendship and Narrative Form After Bloomsbury makes a compelling argument for the continuing vitality of the modernist paradigm: as solace, as exemplar, and as inspiration. Through nuanced readings of works by Rachel Cusk, Michael Cunningham, Zadie Smith and others, Wolfe mounts a persuasive sociological argument for the capacity of the contemporary novel to enlarge its readers’ emotional intelligence. The book risks asking if the expanded – and hard-fought -- sexual freedoms of the post-Freudian era have made us happier? and answers with a resounding affirmative. In Wolfe’s hands, the contemporary novel, inspired by the inventions of Bloomsbury modernism, is recast as nothing less than a guide to private life, past and present – and to future possibilities, as well. * Victoria Rosner, Professor and Dean of The Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University, USA *
Engrossing and stimulating, Wolfe’s Love, Friendship, and Narrative Form After Bloomsbury: The Progress of Intimacy in History is that rare breed of book which simultaneously informs, discovers, and enchants. Boldly bridging times and media, it focuses on the legacy of the innovation in the understanding and representation of intimacy that the Bloomsbury Group and its co-travellers bequeathed to intellectual and social history. As the Bloomsbury public and private sphere interventions (interracial, same-sex, and polyamorous forms of intimacy and challenging of amatonormative values) and correlative transformations in narrative form changed the modes in which we perceive and articulate intimacy through lenses of despair and hope, they made the future generations of artists and audiences appreciate the impact of historical forces on intimate feelings and relationships and our creative capacities to engage with and alter these forces. Wolfe’s book focuses on these dialogues with fervour and rigour. Texts by Rachel Cusk, Zadie Smith, Michael Cunningham, Pat Barker, and Salman Rushdie receive sparkling readings when emplaced in metamodernist, ‘metabloomsbury’ contexts; in turn, modernists texts by Wolf, Forster, Freud, Lawrence, and Joyce reappear in a fresh light and with new urgency. Sweeping across the arcs of social history and thinking about intimacy in the long twentieth century, and adroitly shifting between vast sociological vistas and close textual analyses, Love, Friendship, and Narrative Form After Bloomsbury: The Progress of Intimacy in History revisions the position and real-world impact of the creative interventions in the discourse of intimacy in the ways that appear both hermeneutically useful and socially necessary. -- Professor Sanja Bahun, University of Essex, UK