The Years、リベラリズム、アソシエイション : ブルームズベリー・グループの政治文化(関東英文学研究)

抄録

The status of The Years (1937) still remains unstable both within the catalogue of Virginia Woolf's works, and in the English modernist canon. Tracing the Pargiter family and two related families from 1880 to the "Present Day," the narrative history closes with Eleanor Pargiter's vision of life: the enclosed moment of wholeness in which the present time of the human race is combined with the past and the future. This representation of socio-political totality is meaningfully ambiguous: Woolf's politics of cultural space in The Years is markedly different from the overtly individualist vision of the cosmopolitan female artist in the high modernist To the Lighthouse; and yet, Eleanor's new projection of singular collectivity from the standpoint of English liberalism distinguishes the apparently realist and still symbolic The Years from the collective and popular pageant form of Between the Acts through which a ritualized national history of England is staged. Retracing various historical adaptations and transformations of English liberalism as the ideology of the dominant class and modern capitalism, Raymond Williams' shrewd and succinct critical interpretation examines the historical formation of the Bloomsbury Group in terms of "fractions by association." Williams' diagnosis that Bloomsbury as a cultural group is "indeed, and differentially, a group of and for the notion of free individuals" is useful to clarify the unstable and significantly complex nature of Woolf's representation of new collectivity by groups. The cultural space of The Years is further explored in terms of Helen McCarthy's politics of association in the inter war socio-political history of the British Empire. My own (re)reading of both The Years and English modernism in terms not only of gender difference but also of generations shows that the strange survival of liberalism in The Years is best approached through the new politics of civic association in which various centrist and cross-party groupings, such as the liberal-internationalist League of Nations Union and female philanthropists' organizations, come to be a dominant determinant of social (re)formations. In other words, the political culture of the Bloomsbury Group, I argue, should be reconsidered by critically re-tracing the representations of association.