Bloomsbury Group and Crescent School: Contact and comparison (England, China)

This dissertation is a comparative study of two literary groups: the Bloomsbury Group in England and the Crescent School in China. Both being active in the early part of the twentieth century, they have quite a few things in common. The similarities include their upper-middle class origin, their rejection of the religious and ethical dogmas of an earlier age, their liberal stand in political and social affairs, their emphasis and experiment on literary/artistic forms, and even their love for parties where anything, or almost anything, could be discussed. The number and range of items that could be put on this list pique curiosity. Did they ever meet each other? one wonders.; A careful search revealed two personal contacts between the groups more than a continent apart. While studying in England between 1920 and 1922, Xu Zhimo, a Chinese student and future member of the Crescent School, befriended the Bloomsbury art critic and painter Roger Fry and the Group's close associate Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. Julian Bell, himself born in Bloomsbury, went to China to teach English in the 1930's and fell in love with Crescent writer Ling Shuhua. The Cambridge classicist and the postimpressionist painter might well have influenced Xu's poetics when he started to write “new poetry.” Julian Bell was certainly germane to the writing of Ling's autobiography Ancient Melodies. There are even traces of conscious imitation among the Crescent writers of Virginia Woolf's stream-of-consciousness technique.; Further study, however, revealed discrepancies between the two cultural phenomena each imbedded in its own history and society. The Crescent writers inherited at least as much from the Chinese literary tradition as they adopted from the West. Ideologywise, they were not as cut-off from the “toiling” masses as their English counterparts; their attitude toward war was nearer to the younger Bloomsbury than to their pacifist elders. In spite of all these differences, however, the Crescent School is still the nearest kin of the Bloomsbury Group in China. Studying them side by side is interesting as well as helpful for understanding these two groups and the cultures that nurtured them.