Abstract: Love, Friendship, and Narrative Form After Bloomsbury shows how a set of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers have variously engaged Bloomsburian legacies to explore the possibilities for thinking about intimacy today. Blending post-critique’s affirmative turn, contextualist close reading, and metamodernism’s study of contemporary engagements with modernist pasts, Wolfe finds that even as the ultimate progress of intimacy is a mixture of slight gains amid troublingly enduring impasses, the imaginative resources of the Bloomsbury Group and those of its inheritors continue to offer the potential for rethinking intimacy in more open and optimistic ways. In doing so, Wolfe exemplifies the power of methodologically pluralistic studies of literature that are ultimately oriented toward socially liberating values.
Jack Dudley (2025) studied this question.