Economic Ideas and British Literature, 1900–1930: The Fabian Society, Bloomsbury, and The New Age

Abstract

This article argues that economic ideas were a fundamental shaping force for popular and avant-garde writers between 1900 and 1930 by giving an overview of three economic movements and connecting these ideas to literary experiments. The first section traces the impact of Fabian socialism's economic ideas on George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, and indicates a number of other Fabian writers. The second section describes the creation of an academic orthodoxy in economics, and then explores how Bloomsbury's intellectual climate produced the interrelated phenomena of Keynes's economics, Roger Fry's Omega Workshops, the Hogarth Press, and Virginia Woolf's literary innovation. The final section documents Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Katherine Mansfield's involvement with the ideas of the radical economic journal, The New Age, and suggests connections between these ideas and the writers’ formal experiments. By tracing these intellectual networks, a number of historical connections between the economic problems of this period and the present emerge, indicating exciting directions for new research.