Queer Bloomsbury

Queer Bloomsbury consists of queer studies essays by sixteen renowned experts on the Bloomsbury Group. The book explores cultural, ideological and aesthetic facets of the Bloomsbury Group's development as a queer subculture and provides substantive information on the queer philosophical and ethical underpinnings of the group. The book elaborates the ways the Bloomsbury Group queered their living arrangements, loves and sexual relationships, daily routines, friendships and companions, enabling them to think and work in ways we now term ‘modernist’. Reimagining their lives queerly, even the heterosexual members were able to think outside the heteronormative structures and strictures of their parents' Victorianism and Britain's Georgian era. Their modernist ideology and aesthetics were enabled by their queer ones. In addition to new essays by widely recognized Bloomsbury scholars, five important ground-breaking essays are republished here, including Carolyn Heilbrun's germinal 1968 essay on the sexual dissidence of the Bloomsbury Group and Christopher Reed's influential 1991 essay exposing homophobia among academic scholars writing about the group. Also included are rarely seen reproductions of Duncan Grant's and Carrington's work from archives and a private collection. The book is edited and introduced by Brenda Helt and Madelyn Detloff. Essays are authored by Carolyn Heilbrun, Brenda Silver, Christopher Reed, George Piggford, Bill Maurer, Brenda Helt, Regina Marler, Darren Clarke, Todd Avery, Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr., Madelyn Detloff, Elyse Blankley, Mark Hussey, Jodie Medd and Kimberly Engdahl Coates.