Metonomy and Bloomsbury

31:1, Book Reviews cated Marxist position that painstakingly develops its historical context. Her book will rank among the notable newer studies of Wilde by other recent critics not, alas, represented in Bloom's anthology—Rodney Shewan, Isobel Murray, and Katharine Worth, to name but a few. Indeed Bloom's gallery of Wilde critics is itself a victim of influence, reprinting older and more "canonical" studies, including valuable work by Eric Bentley, G. Wilson Knight, Epifanio San Juan, Jr., and of course the landmark essays of Richard Ellmann. A more adventurous selection would have been possible, and one of the most deserving candidates for inclusion in such an anthology would have been—not only Gagnier, Murray, Worth, Shewan, and so on—but Bloom himself. Kerry Powell Miami University METONOMY AND BLOOMSBURY S. P. Rosenbaum. Victorian Bloomsbury: The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987. $24.95 The various studies of the Bloomsbury Group available today assume a coherent intellectual heritage shared by the group, but before S. P. Rosenbaum's Victorian Bloomsbury: The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group, the existence of that heritage was a largely unexamined assumption. Rosenbaum converts assumption into fact by a detailed examination of primary and secondary materials . The text is the first of a two-part literary history. The second volume, entitled Edwardian Bloomsbury, will follow the group's literary history up to the time of World War I. Rosenbaum notes that "There is a justifiable scepticism today about the traditional assumptions of literary history—about the causal relations of historical conditions and creative processes, about the critical significance of sources, about the logic of influences" (2). Rosenbaum does not argue causes, sources, or influences. Instead he offers "analysis and comparison of a chronological series of interrelated texts" (2). Paradoxically, the effect of viewing these texts together is to convince the reader, more effectively than any one-dimensional argument from cause to effect could have, of the tissue of influence that united the Bloomsbury Group. This book is a welcome alternative, not only to current Bloomsbury studies, but to current fashions in literary studies themselves. Following Roman Jakobson, Rosenbaum describes the "contiguity disorder" such literary studies evidence: "Our literary studies are preoccupied with what [Jakobson] calls the metaphoric pole of verbal process—with the similitudes of literature; the métonymie pole of contiguity, of spatial and temporal context, remains unattractive" (16). Rosenbaum offers the "great-man" theory of literary context, according to which the "earlier twentieth century is called the age of Joyce or Lawrence, Eliot or 81 31:1, Book Reviews Pound" (17), as an example of the distortion inherent in metaphoric literary history. He continues: (Even a great-woman theory of literary history would be an improvement on these simplifications: the failure of historians and anthologists of modernism to recognise until quite recently the movement for the emancipation of women as a fundamental characteristic of modernism shows what can happen when historical contexts are ignored.) The Bloomsbury Group is a good place for métonymie literary study. (17) The first of this métonymie study's four sections is devoted to "Origins." Here Rosenbaum examines the Victorian intellectual inheritance that Bloomsbury perpetuated, even while modifing it. He considers Victorian evangelicalism, utilitarianism, liberalism and aestheticism. He devotes a chapter to Leslie Stephen with whom Bloomsbury differed regarding the moral utility of literature but from whom (in part) the group inherited its skepticism, its beliefs in human affection and in individual freedom, and its interest in biography and autobiography. Rosenbaum also studies various Victorian autobiographies for their "visions" of houses, schools and families which impacted upon the Bloomsbury Group either negatively or positively. The other three sections all deal with the turn-of-the-century Cambridge experience , the literary and philosophical education its young men received, and the sorts of undergraduate writing they produced. Rosenbaum resurrects the latenineteenth -century terms of a Cambridge education. He considers the meaning of membership in the Apostles, the activities of various reading societies, the literary assumptions at the University, and the distinctions between Kingsmen and Trinity men. At Cambridge learning was often an extracurricular activity. The young men who became...