My book, Fashioning Bloomsbury will be the first to examine how the Bloomsbury Group (considered the most prominent English artistic and intellectual cohort of the past two hundred years) echoed but also resisted the legacy of British imperialism through their engagement with material objects—namely fabric, clothing, texts, photographs, and artwork. In particular, I argue, through the clothing they wore, thought about, and produced, they expressed the period’s distinctive convergence of revolutionary artistic practices and the pervasiveness of imperialism as a lingering ideology. At the heart of this book is the pressing question that propels my research: How has Bloomsbury’s legacy of making and thinking about objects influenced or intersected with the wider contemporary context in which the language of imperial exceptionalism has fueled pro-Brexit rhetoric?
keywords
twentieth-century British literature, modernism and empire, gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, neo-materialism
