Bloomsbury And France

"Bloomsbury on the Mediterranean," is how Vanessa Bell described France in a letter to her sister, Virginia Woolf. Remarking on the vivifying effect of Cassis, Woolf herself said, "I will take my mind out of its iron cage and let it swim.... Complete heaven, I think it." Yet until now there has never been a book that focused on the profound influence of France on the Bloomsbury group. In Bloomsbury and France: Art and Friends, Mary Ann Caws and Sarah Bird Wright reveal the crucial importance of the Bloomsbury group's frequent sojourns to France, the artists and writers they met there, and the liberating effect of the country itself. Drawing upon many previously unpublished letters, memoirs, and photographs, the book illuminates the artistic development of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, David Garnett, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and others. The authors cover all aspects of the Bloomsbury experience in France, from the specific influence of French painting on the work of Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell, to the heady atmosphere of the medieval Cistercian Abbaye de Pontigny, the celebrated meeting place of French intellectuals where Lytton Strachey, Julian Bell, and Charles Mauron mingled with writers and critics, to the relationships between the Bloomsbury group and Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Andre Gide, Jean Marchand, and many others. Caws and Wright argue that Bloomsbury would have been very different without France, that France was their anti-England, a culture in which their eccentricities and aesthetic experiments could flower. This remarkable study offers a rich new perspective on perhaps the most creative group of artists and friends in the 20th century.

"Bloomsbury on the Mediterranean," is how Vanessa Bell described France in a letter to her sister, Virginia Woolf. Remarking on the vivifying effect of Cassis, Woolf herself said, "I will take my mind out of its iron cage and let it swim.... Complete heaven, I think it." Yet until now there has never been a book that focused on the profound influence of France on the Bloomsbury group. In Bloomsbury and France: Art and Friends, Mary Ann Caws and Sarah Bird Wright reveal the crucial importance of the Bloomsbury group's frequent sojourns to France, the artists and writers they met there, and the liberating effect of the country itself. Drawing upon many previously unpublished letters, memoirs, and photographs, the book illuminates the artistic development of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, David Garnett, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and others. The authors cover all aspects of the Bloomsbury experience in France, from the specific influence of French painting on the work of Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell, to the heady atmosphere of the medieval Cistercian Abbaye de Pontigny, the celebrated meeting place of French intellectuals where Lytton Strachey, Julian Bell, and Charles Mauron mingled with writers and critics, to the relationships between the Bloomsbury group and Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Andre Gide, Jean Marchand, and many others. Caws and Wright argue that Bloomsbury would have been very different without France, that France was their anti-England, a culture in which their eccentricities and aesthetic experiments could flower. This remarkable study offers a rich new perspective on perhaps the most creative group of artists and friends in the 20th century.

Place and Locality in Modern France analyses the significance and changing constructions of local place in modern France. Drawing on the expertise of a range of scholars from around the world, this book provides a timely overview of the cross-disciplinary thinking that is currently taking place over a central issue in French history. The contributed chapters address a range of subjects that include: the politics of administrative reform, decentralization, regionalism and local advocacy; the role of commerce in engendering narratives and experience of local place; the importance of ethnic, class, gender and race distinctions in shaping local connection and identity; the generation and transmission of knowledge about local place and culture through academia, civic heritage and popular memory. As a reconsideration of the 'local' in French history, Place and Locality in Modern France bridges the divide between micro- and macro-history for all those interested in ideas of locality and culture in modern French and European history.

This volume is a ground-breaking contribution to enlightenment studies and the international and cross-cultural history of print. The result of a five year research project, the volume traces the output and dissemination of books and how reading tastes changed in the years 1769-1794. Mapping the book trade of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), a Swiss publisher-wholesaler which operated throughout Europe, the authors reconstruct the cosmopolitan elite culture of the later enlightenment, incorporating many engaging case studies. The STN's archives are uniquely rich in both detail and range, and while these archives have long attracted book historians (notably Robert Darnton, a leading scholar of the Enlightenment), existing work is fragmentary and limited in scope. By means of comparative study, the author considers the entire book market across Europe, making local, regional and chronological nuances, based on advanced taxonomies of subject content, author information, markers of illegality and much more. This volume is, in short, the most diverse and detailed study of the late 18th-century book trade yet, while offering fresh insights into the enlightenment.

Post-Rationalism takes the experimental journal of psychoanalysis and philosophy, Cahiers pour l'Analyse, as its main source. Established by students of Louis Althusser in 1966, the journal has rarely figured in the literature, although it contained the first published work of authors now famous in contemporary critical thought, including Alain Badiou, Jean-Claude Milner, Luce Irigaray, André Green and Jacques-Alain Miller. The Cahiers served as a testing ground for the combination of diverse intellectual sources indicative of the period, including the influential reinvention of Freud and Marx undertaken by Lacan and Althusser, and the earlier post-rationalist philosophy of science pioneered by Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem and Alexandre Koyré. This book is a wide-ranging analysis of the intellectual foundations of structuralism, re-connecting the work of young post-Lacanian and post-Althusserian theorists with their predecessors in French philosophy of science. Tom Eyers provides an important corrective to standard histories of the period, focussing on the ways in which French epistemological writing of the 1930s and 1940s - especially that of Bachelard and Canguilhem - laid the ground for the emergence of structuralism in the 1950s and 1960s, thus questioning the standard historical narrative that posits structuralism as emerging chiefly in reaction to phenomenology and existentialism.

French thinkers such as Lacan and Derrida are often labelled as representatives of 'poststructuralism' in the Anglophone world. However in France, where their work originated, they use no such category; this group of theorists – 'the poststructuralists' - were never perceived as a coherent intellectual group or movement. Outlining the institutional contexts, affinities, and rivalries of, among others, Althusser, Barthes, Foucault, Irigaray, and Kristeva, Angermuller – drawing from Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital and the academic field – insightfully explores post-structuralism as a phenomenon. By tracing the evolution of the French intellectual field after the war, Why There is No Poststructuralism in France places French Theory both in the specific material conditions of its production and the social and historical contexts of its reception, accounting for a particularly creative moment in French intellectual life which continues to inform the theoretical imaginary of our time.

This collection examines relations between France and Britain, in particular their conflicting memories of key episodes in their recent past.

Photographs, some barely known, on the domestic lives of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) and the historical, cultural and artistic milieux of their circle in Bloomsbury, including Vivienne Eliot, Vita Sackville-West, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Dora Carrington.