Comparative Modernism: The Bloomsbury Group and the Harlem Renaissance

Abstract

In October 1928, Virginia Woolf was preparing the Cambridge lectures on women and fiction that would become the text of A Room of One’s Own the following year. In October of 1928, Zora Neale Hurston apprenticed herself to a voodoo priestess in New Orleans as part of her ongoing research into African-American folk culture. On the surface, two more dissimilar women could hardly be found, yet Virginia Woolf and Zora Neale Hurston do warrant comparison. Both sought innovative narrative means of articulating human experience. Both located similar expressions of intense emotion. And both were at the vanguard of their artistic coteries, the Bloomsbury Group and the Harlem Renaissance. In this chapter, I discuss each group’s formation along with some of their principal figures and activities, consider the influence of group identity on Woolf and Hurston, and explore factors contributing to each group’s legacy. It is beyond my scope here to rehearse the wealth of critical studies, memoirs and fictional accounts of the Bloomsbury Group and the Harlem Renaissance. Rather, I wish to suggest how Bloomsbury and Harlem might be brought closer together in our minds, our scholarship and our classrooms, as placing them alongside one another affords fresh insights into transatlantic modernism — the outpourings of creative expression in London and New York City in the early twentieth century.