The Muddle and the Dream: Intimacy, Utopia, and the Legacies of Bloomsbury in Contemporary Novels

FAIN: HB-50510-14

Jesse Wolfe
California State University, Stanislaus Foundation (Turlock, CA 95382-3200)

Funding would support the completion of "The Muddle and the Dream," the author's second scholarly book, and two journal articles derived from the book. The book will be of value to scholars and general readers interested in contemporary marriage and intimacy as topics of sociological and philosophical study, as well as those interested in psychology, gender studies, and 20th-century literature, including the "legacies" of modernist authors such as Virginia Woolf and Sigmund Freud. "The Muddle and the Dream" builds on concepts developed in the author's first book "Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy" (Cambridge UP 2011) which has received very enthusiastic reviews. By supplying historical and demographic contexts, and by engaging with ideas from the emerging field of intimacy studies, the proposed book promises to shed new light on six major contemporary novelists.

Associated Products

"Edward Carpenter, E.M. Forster, and the Future" (Book Section)
Title: "Edward Carpenter, E.M. Forster, and the Future"
Author: Jesse Wolfe
Editor: Derek Ryan
Editor: Stephen Ross
Abstract: xx
Year: 0000
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Book Title: Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group

"Woolf, Bloomsbury, and Intimacy" (Book Section)
Title: "Woolf, Bloomsbury, and Intimacy"
Author: Jesse Wolfe
Editor: Jessica Berman
Abstract: pp. 359-75
Year: 2016
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Book Title: A Companion to Virginia Woolf

"Intimacy-in-History and Dreams of Perfection" (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: "Intimacy-in-History and Dreams of Perfection"
Author: Jesse Wolfe
Abstract: Conference held at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Date: 12/4/2017
Conference Name: "Metaphysics of Love" Conference

"What We Talk About When We Talk About History" (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: "What We Talk About When We Talk About History"
Author: Jesse Wolfe
Abstract: Conference held at Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
Date: 10/29/2015
Conference Name: "Intimate Modernism" Symposium

Love, Friendship, and Narrative Form After Bloomsbury: The Progress of Intimacy in History (Book)
Title: Love, Friendship, and Narrative Form After Bloomsbury: The Progress of Intimacy in History
Author: Jesse Wolfe
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=1350328820
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry (1350328820)
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 1350328820

Love, Friendship, and Narrative Form After Bloomsbury (Book)
Title: Love, Friendship, and Narrative Form After Bloomsbury
Author: Jesse Wolfe
Abstract: Exploring how the Bloomsbury Group's cutting-edge thinkers-Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, and E. M. Forster-understood the intimacy of friends, lovers, spouses, and families as historically unfolding phenomena, this book offers a compelling account of modernism's legacies in contemporary fiction and demonstrates the myriad ways in which intimacy was a guiding and persistent idea explored by writers across the 20th-century and up to the present day. Often modernists have been celebrated for their insights into social and civilizational sickness but this book unearths a strain of modernist thought that is more complex and inspiring than this. It discusses how Bloomsbury's thinkers wrestled with the question “Does intimate life improve?” as sexual egalitarianism expands, as taboos against same-sex love, interracial love, and singlehood wane, and as parents and children relate less formally and often more warmly toward one another. And it discusses how many of today's major novelists, such as Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan and Rachel Cusk, look to Bloomsbury's thematic and formal examples when they reformulate this question for our time.
Year: 2023
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781350328839

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