Chapter 5 - Taste and Cultural Progress in Bloomsbury and Beyond

Summary

Focusing particularly on the work of painter and critic Roger Fry, critic Clive Bell, novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf, and literary theorist I. A. Richards, the final chapter considers the legacy of evolutionary aestheticism in the first decades of the twentieth century. Although these twentieth-century writers rejected the developmental telos that defined nineteenth-century evolutionary aestheticism, this chapter argues that they inherited many of their predecessors’ ideas about the anti-utilitarian ethics of beauty, the spiritual potency of aesthetic pleasure, and, consequently, the long-term social benefits of good taste. By drawing a through line from mid nineteenth-century evolutionary aesthetics to the aesthetics of the Bloomsbury group and the principles of New Criticism, this chapter also contributes to a body of recent scholarship reassessing conventional narratives about modernism and its purportedly radical break from Victorian concerns and values.