Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-01, Section: A, page: 0008.

Adviser: Robert L. Herbert.

To re-imagine domesticity: the phrase implies a dual process of reconceiving and expressing through imagery ideas of a new home life. This, I argue, is the basic project of the Bloomsbury artists--Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant--who built on the foundation of aesthetic activism laid by their Victorian predecessors. My approach combines close visual analysis of individual objects or projects with examination of relevant textual sources: the artists' letters, the Formalist aesthetic theory developed in the writings of Roger Fry and Clive Bell, and the writing of Bloomsbury figures including Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, and Virginia and Leonard Woolf.

A theoretical introduction uses the opposition between concepts of "heroism" and "housework" to establish the ideological difference that separates the domestic focus Bloomsbury and its Victorian antecedants from what became the mainstream of modernism in the arts. The first two chapters then place Bloomsbury in the context of the Arts and Crafts Movement and the Aesthetic Movement from which the group emerged. There follows an examination of the development of Bloomsbury's domestic modernism between 1904-1914. Throughout, questions of sexual identity are a central focus in this study of women, gay men, and others who imagined (and imaged) new ways of living outside conventional domestic norms.