The purpose of this thesis is to present the Bloomsbury Group - a cultural coterie of elite intellectuals from the upper-middle class in the first decades of the twentieth century - from a broad cultural and historical context. The group's influence on the social and cultural life was of utmost importance, even more so after the establishment of the Omega Workshops and the Hogarth Press. As a representative of the modern stream of consciousness novel, Virginia Woolf was one of the most prominent figures within Bloomsbury. According to literary critics, her novels To the Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway and The Waves are among the greatest achievements in modernist literature. To the Lighthouse was written while the Bloomsbury circle was at the peak of its creativity. Through the character of the painter Lily Briscoe, this thesis attempts to shed light on how the novel was influenced by the theoretical standpoint of the art critic and painter Roger Fry, who became a member of the Bloomsbury Group in 1910.
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