Bloomsbury Group, Beat Generation

Bloomsbury Group
1907
Essentialist definers[who?] of Bloomsbury have sometimes questioned the existence of the group.[citation needed] Yet the lives and works of the group members show an overlapping, interconnected similarity of ideas and attitudes that helped to keep the friends and relatives together. Their convictions about the nature of consciousness and its relation to external nature, about the fundamental separateness of individuals that involves both isolation and love, about the human and non-human nature of time and death, and about the ideal goods of truth love and beauty – all these were largely shared[citation needed], underlie the group’s core dissatisfactions with capitalism and its wars of imperialism[citation needed]. These "Bloomsbury assumptions" are also reflected in members' criticisms of materialistic realism in painting and fiction as well as attacks on what Bloomsbury group members saw as repressive practices of sexual inequality, and in attempts to establish a new social order based upon liberation from these established norms.[citation needed] Love (an inner state) was held in higher esteem than monogamy (a demonstrable behavior)[citation needed], and several of the members had more than one serious relationship simultaneously[citation needed], and also cast aside normative behaviors in regard to child care[citation needed], in the spirit of what came to be known as polyfidelity later in the 20th century[citation needed]. (Term attributed to Nicholas Albery, author of "The Book of Social Inventions".[citation needed])

The beat generation
1950
The Beat Generation is a term used to describe a group of American writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, and the cultural phenomena that they wrote about and inspired (later sometimes called "beatniks"). Central elements of "Beat" culture included experimentation with drugs and alternative forms of sexuality, an interest in Eastern religion, and a rejection of materialism.
The major works of Beat writing are Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957).[1] Both Howl and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize what could be published in the United States. On the Road transformed Kerouac's friend Neal Cassady into a youth-culture hero. The members of the Beat Generation quickly developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity.