“Full of Experiments and Reforms”: Bloomsbury’s Literature and Economics.

Abstract

Much of Bloomsbury’s fiction takes economics as a central concern – for example, Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day and The Years, as well as E. M. Forster’s Howards End and A Passage to India, and Leonard Woolf’s early anti-imperialist novel The Village in the Jungle. This interest in economics is even more characteristic of Bloomsbury’s essays and polemics, including Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Mutually influencing each other in the multidisciplinary context of Bloomsbury, Keynes and Virginia Woolf – as well as Leonard Woolf and E. M. Forster – all, in varying ways, conceive of economic goals not as ends in themselves but as a basis for the production of art and the achievement of the good life. They work toward these aims by using a method of inquiry that, because it acknowledges uncertainty, is experimental and iterative, yet more accurate in representing the empirical conditions of the “real world” than overly reductionist neoclassical economic precision can yield. My dissertation hypothesizes that, for Bloomsbury, Keynesian economics and modernist literature both foreground a “linguistic turn” toward vagueness, and both privilege a substantive concept that is philosophical and, to some degree, political: we might characterize it in terms of the Cambridge philosopher G.E. Moore’s ethical analysis of value in the context of the good life. Intellectual history scholars have established a linkage between Keynesian macroeconomics and Cambridge philosophy. My project argues for a further linkage, through language and indeterminacy in the context of modernism, among those two disciplines and Bloomsbury’s literature. Recovering epistemological continuities between Keynes and the thinkers and writers of Bloomsbury offers the potential for a new reading of Bloomsbury’s modernist impact on Anglo-American cultural, economic and sociopolitical history.