English 273 - BLOOMSBURY AND SEXUALITY

Members of the Bloomsbury movement led non-normative (what many now call queer) lives. The complexity and openness of their relationships characterized not only the lives but also the major works of fiction, art, design, and critical writings its members produced. “Sex permeated our conversation,” Woolf recalls, and in Bloomsbury and Sexuality we’ll explore the far-reaching consequences of this ostensible removal of discursive, social, and sexual inhibition in the spheres of literature, art, and social sciences. The course will draw from the art of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, the writings of E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes and others, along with contemporary queer theory.