Beauty Rewrites Literary History: Revisiting the Myth of Bloomsbury

Waugh, Patricia

Abstract

The question, ‘what was Bloomsbury’, elicits two responses: a catalogue of the people, the place, the moment; but more compelling, and more elusive, the evocation of an ethos. Bloomsbury is seen to have rein-vented beauty and the beautiful soul. If there is a single paragraph that has served as touchstone for this perception, it is G. E. Moore’s definitive peroration in the final chapter of Principia Ethica (1903): By far the most valuable things we can know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects.1

Citation

Waugh, P. (2015). Beauty Rewrites Literary History: Revisiting the Myth of Bloomsbury. In C. Saunders, J. Macnaughton, & D. Fuller (Eds.), The recovery of beauty : arts, culture, medicine (108-128). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426741_7

• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2015
• Deposit Date: Jan 24, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 1, 2018
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Pages: 108-128
• Book Title: The recovery of beauty : arts, culture, medicine.
• ISBN: 9781349577798
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426741_7
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1664277
• Contract Date: Jan 31, 2015