bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Teatro da Experiência
Authors: Townsend Sarah J.
Published: September 2018

Teatro da Experiência was a 275-seat theater housed in the Clube dos Artistas Modernos, a controversial club for ‘modern artists’ in São Paulo (Brazil) that served as a site of intense intellectual and political activity from November 1932 to December 1933. Directed by the architect and multimedia artist Flávio de Carvalho, it played an important (if often overlooked) role as one of only a handful of theater projects linked to the movement known as Brazilian modernismo. In November 1932, only days after opening its doors, the theater was forced to shut down when police interrupted a performance of Bailado do Deus Morto (Dance of the Dead God), a ritualistic performance piece written by Carvalho and enacted by an almost entirely black cast. The closure of Teatro da Experiência was a sign of the increasingly repressive atmosphere that had begun to develop under the soon-to-be dictator Getúlio Vargas, and it spelled the end of efforts to stage experimental theater in Brazil for a decade.
Teatro del Murciélago [Theatre of the Bat]
Authors: Townsend Sarah J.
Published: September 2018

Teatro del Murciélago (Theatre of the Bat) was a group that gave what appears to have been its only public performance at the Teatro Olimpia in Mexico City on September 17, 1924. Inspired by La Chauve-Souris, a touring revue troupe formed by Parisian-based Russian émigrés, the Murciélago brought together figures linked to the avant-garde movement known as estridentismo and artist-ethnographers who had worked among indigenous communities in central Mexico. Although its existence was ephemeral, the group served as an inspiration for other artists over the following decade and is regarded as one of the most significant theatre experiments of the Mexican avant-garde.

One of the roots of the Teatro del Murciélago grew out of a project led by Manuel Gamio, known as the founding father of modern anthropology in Mexico. In conjunction with his archaeological excavation of the ancient Toltec city of Teotihuacán, Gamio organized an anthropological study of the indigenous communities who lived in the surrounding valley and employed several artists whose task was to create pieces of ‘regional theatre’—stylized depictions of indigenous customs with the faint outlines of a plot, most often revolving around scenes of daily life and local fiestas. These short, simple plays were performed in an open-air theatre by indigenous actors for other members of the community as well as for tourists from urban areas as part of Gamio’s project to encourage an ‘ethnic’ or ‘cultural fusion’ among the nation’s diverse peoples.
Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile (1865–1950)
Authors: Odom Selma Landen
Published: September 2018

Émile Jaques-Dalcroze was a Swiss musician and music educator who developed a method of music education that combines movement and ear training with physical, vocal, and instrumental improvisation. He is often called Dalcroze, the pseudonym he added to his family name Jaques (spelled without a ‘c’) as a young man. In English his method is known as Dalcroze eurhythmics. In the early 1900s he devised activities of rhythmic stepping, breathing, conducting, and gesturing to help people experience musical concepts and feelings in the body. A charismatic teacher and pianist, Dalcroze presented demonstrations of his experimental pedagogy throughout Europe, and from 1910 to 1914 he taught several hundred professional students from various countries at the Bildungsanstalt Jaques-Dalcroze, the purpose-built training institute he directed in Hellerau, near Dresden. In 1915 he established the Institut Jaques-Dalcroze in Geneva, the city where most of his sixty-year career unfolded. In addition to inspiring many who became teachers and artists, he composed and wrote prolifically. He published a large musical oeuvre, teaching manuals, articles, reviews, and several books of essays and memoirs. His influence extended beyond music into dance, theatre, therapy, and education. The Dalcroze method, handed down and enriched by generations of teaching musicians, continues to explore core practices of this heritage today. Geneva serves as centre for the most advanced qualification, while training programs are offered in Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia.
Lutyens, Elisabeth (1906–1983)
Authors: Hawkes Joel
Published: September 2018

(Agnes) Elisabeth Lutyens, CBE, was an English composer, credited with helping to establish the twelve-tone method of serialism in Britain. Lutyens’s first major composition using this technique, Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 7, was premiered in London on the first night of the blitz in 1940. Lutyens insisted she came upon this technique herself, and was not inspired by the work of Arnold Schoenberg, who is acknowledged as its pioneer. In the twelve-tone method the notes of the chromatic scale are ordered into a series that functions as a unifying principle for harmony, melody and variation—all twelve notes of the scale are sounded an equal number of times in a composition to ensure no emphasis on any one. Lutyens often coupled this specialized atonal technique with literary and philosophical text, setting to music writers such as Joyce, Wittgenstein, Beckett, and Dylan Thomas, to create a music both praised and critiqued as intellectualized.
Saunders, Rebecca (1967–)
Authors: Barden Mark
Published: September 2018

One of her generation’s foremost composers, Saunders was born into a musical family (both parents were freelance musicians) on 19 December 1967 and raised in Brixton, a suburb in southeast London. Upon completing her bachelor’s degree in violin and composition (with Nigel Osborne) at the University of Edinburgh, Saunders moved to Germany in 1991 and, abandoning violin, dedicated herself fully to compositional studies with Wolfgang Rihm. She returned to Edinburgh for her doctorate in 1994, permanently relocating to Berlin in 1997. Among her many awards are a DAAD fellowship (1991–1994), the Busoni Förderpreis from the Berlin Academy of the Arts (1995), an Ernst von Siemens Förderpreis (1996), the Paul Hindemith Prize (2003), and the GEMA Deutscher Musikautorenpreis (2010). She was Composer-in-Residence at the Konzerthaus in Dortmund from 2005 to 2006 and Capell-Compositeur at the Staatskapelle Dresden from 2009 to 2010. Following guest professorships in Dresden and Cologne, she was appointed Professor of Composition at Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien in Hanover in 2012. She is frequently invited to give masterclasses and workshops at prominent music schools and international festivals (Darmstadt Summer Courses, Oberlin Conservatory, impuls academy, Ostrava New Music Days, Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, and others).
Turnage, Mark-Anthony (1960--)
Authors: Venn Edward
Published: September 2018

Mark-Anthony Turnage is one of the leading British composers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His prolific output fuses stylistic elements, compositional techniques, and instrumentation from art music, jazz, and popular music, as well as, on occasion, more quotidian material such as football chants. The experience of working with jazz musicians such as Peter Erskine (a regular collaborator) has resulted in a long-standing commitment to improvisation in his music.

Born in Essex, 1960, Turnage encountered a considerable range of art music through his family and, particularly, BBC Radio 3. Turnage had compositional lessons as a teenager with Oliver Knussen; like Knussen, Turnage later studied with John Lambert at the Royal College of Music and Gunther Schuller at Tanglewood. It was during his time at the Royal College that he familiarized himself with jazz and soul; Miles Davis became a particular influence.
Widmer, Ernst (1927--1990)
Authors: Costa Lima Paulo
Published: September 2018

Ernst Widmer considered himself a Brazilian citizen, a Brazilian composer who was born and educated in Switzerland but who bloomed in the tropics. Actually, the theme of the cultural crossing was of great importance for the elaboration of his way of thinking and of composing. He dedicated almost all his entire life to the School of Music of the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), where he taught between 1956 and 1987. During that period, he had a decisive role in turning Salvador into one of the most important centers of contemporary music in Brazil. In particular, he was in charge of the formation of composers, making this activity the basis for his intense artistic performance, which resulted in the composition of about two hundred opuses and thirty-one awards. He exerted great influence on his students and several of them became well known composers, and he also gave extreme value to singularity as a pedagogical parameter, having inspired the creation of the Group of Composers from Bahia in 1966, whose manifest of just one line rejected as a principle any declared principles. After his retirement in 1987, he renewed his ties with his native city in Switzerland, debuting several of his pieces and participating in the creation of the Ernst Widmer Gesellschaft dedicated to promoting his music.
Ali, Ahmed (1910–1994)
Authors: Singh Amardeep
Published: September 2018

Ahmed Ali is one of the pioneers of modernism in the Indian subcontinent. Publishing his works both in Urdu and in English, and with both South Asian and Anglo-American publishing houses, his influence has been transnational in scope, but his major works are deeply rooted in an Islamicate, largely Urdu-speaking cultural milieu. In 1932, Ali collaborated with Sajjad Zaheer on a collection of Urdu short stories called Angarey (Burning Coals), considered by scholars to be the event that instantiated experimental writing on the Indian subcontinent. Angarey was subsequently banned by the British colonial government for its potential to offend Muslims. Ali continued to publish short stories in Urdu throughout the 1930s and in 1936 helped found the All India Progressive Writers Association (AIPWA). However, Ali soon distanced himself from the AIPWA, and in subsequent years he published in both English and Urdu, often translating his own Urdu short stories into English for publication in British and American magazines. In 1940, Ali published what is now considered his most influential work, Twilight in Delhi, in English and with the England-based Hogarth Press. Twilight in Delhi applies stream-of-consciousness techniques to consider the decline of an elite, Urdu-speaking culture in Delhi.
Borges, Jorge Luis (1899–1986)
Authors: Tcherepashenets Nataly
Published: September 2018

Jorge Luis Borges is among the writers who have brought international fame to Latin American Literature. A fabulist, poet, essayist and translator, Borges shaped modern literary perception and became a classic of modern letters. His influential concept of writing as rewriting and his view that each word or group of words has a determinant impact on literature’s effectiveness are crucial to an understanding of his texts and exemplify a modern approach to literary theory.

Borges, whose ancestors were among the first Europeans to arrive in America, was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, a lawyer and psychology teacher with anarchist views, taught Jorge Luis philosophy. His mother, Leonor Acevedo de Borges, a proud descendant of a long line of soldiers and freedom fighters, was a dedicated companion to her son until her death at the age of 99. Her help was indispensable, especially when Jorge Luis’s blindness made it very difficult for him to read and write. Two years after Jorge Luis’ birth, his sister Norah, his closest childhood friend and his first illustrator, was born. Both English and Spanish were used in Borges’ house, and he learned to read English before he could read Spanish. This knowledge played a key role in his work as a translator. He introduced James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Wolf, and William Faulkner to the Spanish-speaking world.
Cendrars, Blaise (1887–1961)
Authors: Sperling Joshua , Wood Jamie
Published: September 2018

Blaise Cendrars was one of the leading experimental writers of the twentieth century. In addition to being a novelist and journalist, he was also a film-maker and explorer. Although his career spanned many decades, Cendrars is now best known for his involvement in the Parisian avant-garde just prior to and following World War I. Cendrars experimented with free verse, image and text, and unusual narrative structures that combined the historical with the biographical and imaginary as a means of capturing the experience of modernity. Immediately following the war he wrote La Fin du monde filmée par l'Ange Notre-Dame (1919), the first poem to assume the form of a screenplay. During the years of his career that followed the First World War, Cendrars turned to the novel and continued to experiment in a variety of genres including the grotesque, reportage, and historical fiction. He died in 1961 following the publication of a tetralogy of memoirs.
Sackville-West, Vita (1892–1962)
Authors: Randall Bryony
Published: September 2018

Vita Sackville-West was a poet, prose writer, and gardener. Much of her work was significantly informed by her close identification with the English landscape, in particular her ancestral home Knole, and Sissinghurst Castle in Kent where she lived from 1930. She is the only author to have won the Hawthornden literary prize twice, first for her long poem The Land (1926), and then for her Collected Poems (1933). Her best-known novels are The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931). She also wrote two classic pieces of travel writing on Iran, Passenger to Teheran and Twelve Days: An Account of a Journey across the Bakhtiari Mountains of South-western Persia 1926 and 1927) based on her visits to and travel with her husband Harold Nicolson, a diplomat; her biographical publications include works on Joan of Arc and Aphra Behn. She is now best known as the model for the eponymous hero/heroine of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando, a work described by Sackville-West’s son Nigel Nicolson as "the longest and most charming love-letter in literature," although in her lifetime she was a more popular writer than Woolf.
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
Authors: Huculak J. Matthew
Published: September 2018

Irish poet, playwright, editor, writer, senator, William Butler Yeats is among the most accomplished authors of the twentieth century; in 1923 he was awarded Nobel Prize in Literature "for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." Yeats’ life spanned a turbulent time in Irish history that began with the rise of the modern home rule movement in the 1860s to the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922. T. S. Eliot noted Yeats was "one of those few poets whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them."
Anglo-Modernism in Canada
Authors: Irvine Dean
Published: September 2018

Among the movements originating in Western Europe that instigated the modernist turn in anglophone Canadian literature, the most prominent were symbolism, impressionism, aestheticism, and decadence, which saw significant uptake by writers of Canada’s fin-de-siècle generation, particularly among those who moved to New York and Boston in the 1890s. Of these Canadian expatriates, Arthur Stringer, who was best known at the time for his crime fiction, later penned Canadian modernism’s first manifesto for free verse in the foreword to his poetry collection Open Water (1914) and produced its earliest stream-of-consciousness prose in his prairie trilogy (The Prairie Wife [1915], The Prairie Mother [1920], and The Prairie Child [1922]). Bliss Carman, who was known as The American High Priest of Symbolism,’ and his cousin Charles G. D. Roberts, embraced a cosmopolitan vogue at the time for ‘everything that’s ‘New’’—namely the latest trends out of Europe. Although Carman’s repute as a leading poet was all but demolished by later generations, his early recognition by Ezra Pound has sustained critical interest, principally for his publication of Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics in 1903—a work of ‘imaginative and … interpretive’ free-verse reconstructions that served as an immediate predecessor to the early imagism of the Anglo-American modernists and their celebrated lyric imitations of Sapphic fragments.
Dehmel, Richard (1863–1920)
Authors: Fialek Marek
Published: September 2018

Richard Dehmel was a German poet and author and a member of the Schwarzes-Ferkel-Kreis (the Black Piglet circle). Viewed from a twenty-first-century perspective, his importance for the Modernism movement in Germany can hardly be overestimated.
Dorn, Ed (1929–1999)
Authors: Spong Stephanie
Published: September 2018

Born in southern Illinois, Edward Merton Dorn marked the trail westward for the Black Mountain poets. He followed the advice of mentor Charles Olson (1910–1970) ‘to dig’ a subject tirelessly to understand the broader strokes of poetry, politics, race and economics in the mid-twentieth century.
Éluard, Paul (1895–1952)
Authors: Doyle Caitlyn
Published: September 2018

The poetry of Paul Éluard, one of the founders of the surrealist movement, is often mistakenly classified as solely belonging to the surrealist style. It is only Éluard’s earlier work, however, that can be defined thus. His later work is characterized by a more formally restrained poetic style and is expressive of a renewed interest in reader accessibility. This period was one of political activism, in which Éluard, breaking with the surrealists, was a central figure in the French Resistance and an active member of the Communist Party.
Eybers, Elisabeth (1915–2007)
Authors: Viljoen Hein
Published: September 2018

Elisabeth Eybers is regarded as the first of the great Afrikaans female poets. She was born in the Western Transvaal and lived in Johannesburg both while a student and during her marriage to the industrialist Albert Wessels (1908–1991). They divorced in 1961, when she moved to Amsterdam. Her initial writerly concerns were with traditional issues like pregnancy, the home and motherhood, but she evolved into a poet who confronted the vicissitudes of life with a strong, ironic voice. She published twenty-two volumes of poetry, all except the last of which are collected in Versamelde gedigte (Collected Poems) (2004), as well as a number of short stories, reviews and essays. She was also an acclaimed poet in the Netherlands.
Modernism in Indian Literature
Authors: Ramakrishnan E. V. , Kumar Udaya
Published: September 2018

Modernism in Indian literature, like Indian modernity, resists tidy definitions. Just as experiences of modernity outside the Western world have prompted accounts of ‘alternative,’ ‘colonial,’ or ‘vernacular’ modernities, literary modernism in India calls for a recognition of historical and locational specificities. A perplexing diversity of languages, communities and literary cultures, the continued life of oral traditions and uneven levels of literacy, and complexities of political and economic realities in postcolonial India confront attempts to chart modernism’s career in India. The category itself is Protean, displaying multiple meanings and accents in various regions and contexts; what follows is no more than a preliminary map aimed at an initial orientation.

Modernist departures in Indian writing, from their beginnings in the 1920s and 1930s, moved away from idealized visions of the human and dominant idioms of nationalist belonging. The thirties also saw the emergence of Marxist literary efforts, with their insistent, critical foregrounding of social reality. The Progressive Writers Association was founded in Lucknow in 1936, and similar outfits came up in many regional languages. Incipient modernism and early progressive writing overlapped in their stark estimation of reality and rejection of literary decorum. Urdu modernists like Sa’adat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chughtai had close associations with the progressives before they parted ways. The Kallol generation poets in Bengal provoked criticism not only for formal innovations but also for their preoccupation with ‘poverty and lust.’
Literary Agents
Authors: Belk Patrick Scott
Published: September 2018

Despite early resistance from publishers such as William Heinemann, the expansion of British and American literary markets between 1880 and World War I rendered the services of a shrewd and knowledgeable literary agent necessary. This was especially the case for authors who hoped to make a living from their literary income. Agents arranged terms, negotiated rights and contracts, assessed markets and placed material accordingly. They helped navigate an increasingly fragmented print culture field and by doing so served an important mediating role between publishers, authors and the mercurial reading public at the turn of the twentieth century.
MacCarthy, Sir Desmond (1877–1952)
Authors: Avery Todd
Published: September 2018

Desmond MacCarthy was a literary critic and journalist. Born in Plymouth and raised in Leeds, he was educated at Eton and then at Trinity College, Cambridge. There, he was elected to the Apostles and began a lifelong friendship with the ethical philosopher G. E. Moore (1873–1958). He also formed close connections with several members of the nascent Bloomsbury Group, of which he was a core member and for which he would later serve as secretary for Roger Fry’s (1866–1934) first Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1910.
Monroe, Harriet (1860–1936)
Authors: Hadjiyiannis Christos
Published: September 2018

Harriet Monroe was an American woman of letters who — from her position as founder and long-time editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse — fostered, promoted, and disseminated modernist literature. Although also a poet, critic, biographer, dramatist and anthologist in her own right, it is her editorship of Poetry that accounts for Monroe’s reputation and warrants her significance as an influential figure in the development of literary modernism. From its inception in October 1912 and throughout modernism’s formative years, Poetry served as the primary venue for the work of prominent modernist writers. H. D., T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Ford Madox Ford, among many others, all found in Poetry a welcoming venue for their work. In her effort to encourage and disseminate modernist literature, Monroe was significantly aided by the magazine’s associate editor (1912-1922), Alice Corbin Henderson, and by Ezra Pound, who acted as Poetry’s foreign correspondent from 1912 to 1917. Poetry continues to publish more than one hundred years after Monroe founded it.
‘Make It New’
Authors: Bledsoe Eric Matthew
Published: September 2018

‘Make It New’ refers to Ezra Pound’s (1885–1972) modernist imperative and his 1934 collection of essays of the same name. This slogan compels the writer to create out of the material of art work that is distinctively innovative. The artist must break with the formal and contextual standards of their contemporaries in making works fundamentally individual. These ‘new’ modern works cannot be wholly autonomous, however, as they must consider the aesthetics of the past in the context of the present moment.
Mann, Klaus (1906–1949)
Authors: Evelein Johannes
Published: September 2018

Klaus Heinrich Thomas Mann was born in 1906 into Germany’s most famous family of writers, in which, he would later write, ‘everything has already been formulated’. Precocious and bent on making his own mark as a writer, his name – a trademark with both Thomas and Heinrich Mann ranking among the most celebrated writers of their time – granted him early access to publication venues, though it also proved at times to be a burden.
Ostenso, Martha (1900–1963)
Authors: Fletcher Alana
Published: September 2018

Martha Ostenso was a critically acclaimed and best-selling author best known for her first novel, Wild Geese (1925). Ostenso is significant to the development of Canadian literary Modernism for her foundational contributions to ‘Prairie Realism’, a literary movement with which Frederick Philip Grove (1879–1948) is also associated. Prairie Realism rejects romanticized versions of the West for detailed descriptions of the landscape and unsentimental examinations of the physical and mental burdens of prairie settler life.
Sologub, Fyodor (1863–1927)
Authors: Syvarth Kristina
Published: September 2018

Fyodor Sologub was a symbolist poet, novelist and playwright, who was known for his decadent style of writing and his elaborate personal mythology centered on myths of the sun, light and death. His best-known work, The Petty Demon (1907), thematizes banality and is deeply pessimistic. Born in St. Petersburg on March 1, 1863, Sologub died in Leningrad on December 5, 1927.
The Bloody Horse
Authors: Tanigawa Katie
Published: September 2018

The Bloody Horse: Writing and the Arts was a Johannesburg-based magazine that published six issues between 1980 and 1981. The idea for the periodical developed from a conversation among Patrick Cullinan (1933–2011), Lionel Abrahams (1928–2004) and Chris Hope (1944–) during the 1974 Poetry Conference in Cape Town. Although the initial conversation led to the creation of Bateleur Press, the trio, alongside Lawrence Herber, began work on The Bloody Horse in 1979 (Cullinan 86). The founders created the magazine to support the increase in ‘writers willing to stick their necks out and say what has to be said’ (Cullinan 86) amid the growing climate of censorship in South Africa. Many of the contributions were politically charged, reflecting Cullinan’s vision that the magazine would reflect ‘the ways in which the writers of this country are reacting to their society’ (Essa 271). The title, The Bloody Horse, is an allusion to South African poet Roy Campbell’s poem ‘On Some South African Novelists’ and highlights the founders’ belief that literature could play a role in South African political discourse. The first issue of The Bloody Horse was published in 1980, and Ampie Coetzee (1939–) served as the magazine’s editor for the duration of its run.
Warren, Robert Penn (1905–1989)
Authors: Kidd Stacy
Published: September 2018

Robert Penn Warren was a renowned poet, novelist, critic and educator. He matriculated to Vanderbilt University in 1921, where, with Allen Tate (1899–1979) and John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974), he became part of The Fugitives, a group of poets named for the journal they published. Warren earned a master’s degree at the University of California and accepted a Rhodes Scholarship to study at New College, Oxford University. Here, he began to pursue the close readings of literary texts that eventually became associated with New Criticism: a focus on the text itself without reference to the biography of the writer or the historical circumstances of the text’s composition or reception.
White, Patrick (1912–1990)
Authors: Stuber Dorian
Published: September 2018

Born in London to parents from established Australian families, Patrick White became one of Australia’s most influential writers, his career culminating in his receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. After a sickly Australian childhood, he was sent to England in his early teens to attend boarding school, where he felt ostracized due to his colonial upbringing and his nascent homosexuality. After two years as a stockman on a ranch in Australia, White returned to England to attend Cambridge from 1932 to 1935, where he published his first works. He served in the Royal Air Force during World War II. While stationed in Egypt, White met a Greek army officer named Manoly Lascaris, who became his lifelong companion.
Marsden, Dora (1882–1960)
Authors: Cohn Jesse S.
Published: September 2018

Dora Marsden significantly influenced the aesthetics of Anglo-American Modernism largely through her creation of a series of journals.
Vladimir Propp (1895–1970)
Authors: Norris Christopher
Published: September 2018

Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp (Владимир Яковлевич Пропп) was a Russian philologist and folklorist who ranks among the most penetrating, original and influential of modern narrative theoreticians. His 1928 work Morphology of the Folk Tale laid the groundwork for many important developments in later narratology, from the formalist/structuralist movements mainly active in Eastern Europe during the pre-World War II period to the heyday of French Structuralism in the 1960s. Propp’s approach was rigorously formal, highly systematic and based on the well-tried analytical techniques of segmentation and recomposition derived from structural phonetics.
The Objectivists
Authors: Jaussen Paul
Published: September 2018

The Objectivist poets were a group of first- and second-generation modernist writers who emerged in the USA during the 1930s. The writers most commonly associated with the movement are Louis Zukofsky (who first used the term ‘objectivist’ to describe poetry), Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Charles Rakosi, the British poet Basil Bunting, and Lorine Niedecker (other poets, such as William Carlos Williams, however, were published under the banner of ‘objectivist’). Most objectivist writing was characterized by an attention to specific particulars and the belief that poems could be material or social objects. Beyond these broad tendencies, however, each writer associated with the movement offered different definitions of ‘objectivist,’ and developed divergent writing practices. Consequently, the term has historical, critical, and evolutionary implications, referring both to specific literary publications, a core of poets whose relationships and affinities continued beyond the early 1930s, and the many subsequent attempts by poets and critics to use ‘objectivist’ as a critical concept.
Dialectical Materialism
Authors: da Silva Karen Correia
Published: September 2018

Dialectical Materialism is a doctrine of late-nineteenth-century German socialist philosophy, which later developed as a central tenet of Marxist political philosophy.
Dilthey, Wilhelm (1833–1911)
Authors: von Freytag-Loringhoven Konstantin
Published: September 2018

Born in Biebrich, Rhineland (now Hesse, Germany), the German philosopher and psychologist Wilhelm Christian Ludwig Dilthey founded the German school of philosophy called Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life). He studied theology, history and philosophy in Heidelberg and Berlin, and in 1864 he was awarded a doctorate for his dissertation on the ethics of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). After holding professorships in Basel, Kiel and Breslau, he became a professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin in 1882. In his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (vol. 1, 1883; Introduction to the Human Sciences), he defined the common method of the humanities.
O’Brien, Flann (1911–1966)
Authors: Hanna Julian
Published: September 2018

Born Brian O’Nolan (or Ó Nualláin) in Strabane, County Tyrone, the novelist and satirist known as Flann O’Brien is now recognized as a leading figure of Irish modernism alongside James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Like Joyce and Beckett, he is also considered to be an important transitional figure to postmodernism. His experimental novels, particularly At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and The Third Policeman (1967), employ many of the techniques later identified as postmodern, including use of parody and pastiche, recycling of genres and characters, and combining of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural forms. Though his acclaim as a novelist was hard won and late in coming, O’Brien enjoyed significant local fame as a journalist for his Cruiskeen Lawn column, which ran in the Irish Times from 1940 to 1960 under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen (also na Gopaleen, ‘Myles of the Ponies’).
Orage, A. R. (1873–1934)
Authors: Kane Louise
Published: September 2018

Born in Dacre, Yorkshire, England, Alfred Richard Orage was a British intellectual and writer and the editor of The New Age magazine. The son of a schoolmaster, Orage too was a schoolmaster, starting his teaching career at Leeds Board School at the age of twenty one. It was in Leeds that he joined the Fabian Society. After meeting Holbrook Jackson (1874–1948) in 1900, the pair founded the Leeds Arts Club (1903) with the aim of furthering avant-garde ideas and philosophy.
Progressivism
Authors: Heimburger Matthew Y.
Published: September 2018

Progressivism was a political and socioeconomic movement central to American national politics from the Gilded Age (1890s) to the end of the Roaring Twenties. At its heart, it was a populist, bipartisan reaction to the excesses of the wealthy ‘robber-baron’ classes and the threat of revolution from the disenfranchised working class – many of whom did not share in the dramatic economic growth of the age – accompanied by a distinctly anti-immigrant nativism.
Oppen, George (1908–1984)
Authors: Shoemaker Steven
Published: September 2018

George Oppen was an innovative poet associated with the Objectivist movement in American poetry. Early in his poetic career, he appeared in both the ‘Objectivist’ number of Poetry magazine (1931) and An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology (1932), both edited by Louis Zukofsky (1904–1978). After a twenty-five year period of silence, Oppen re-emerged in the early 1960s, producing new work that took up a challenging stance toward the American scene of the time. He became an important influence on a number of younger American poets, including members of the Beat and Black Mountain schools. His volume Of Being Numerous (1968) addressed the ongoing war in Vietnam and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. Throughout his work, he sought to use poetry as a ‘test of truth,’ or at the very least a ‘test of sincerity,’ which he defined as follows: ‘there is a moment, an actual time, when you believe something to be true, and you construct a meaning from these moments of conviction’.
Trotsky, Leon (1879–1940)
Authors: Tcherepashenets Nataly
Published: September 2018

Leon Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronstein, is one of the most controversial figures in twentieth-century history. Along with Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), he played a decisive role in the success of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. A Marxist, a revolutionary and a talented writer, Trotsky was a principal commander of the Red Army and a major theoretician of world socialist revolution.
Veblen, Thorstein (1857–1929)
Authors: Merrill Trevor
Published: September 2018

Thorstein Veblen was an American economist, sociologist and social critic. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1884. After a six-year stint on his family’s farm, he found employment at the University of Chicago, where he remained for fourteen years. He is best known for The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), his penetrating and idiosyncratic analysis of the upper middle class.
Volksgemeinschaft
Authors: Volovici Marc
Published: September 2018

The German term Volksgemeinschaft, normally translated as ‘national community’ or ‘people’s community’, expresses an ideal image of a harmonious and united society. The term draws on German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies’s (1855–1936) interpretation of Gemeinschaft as a social model characteristic of families, neighbors and small communities, in which relationships are based on selflessness, solidarity and common values.
Barney, Natalie Clifford (1876–1972)
Authors: Van Houten Christina
Published: September 2018

Natalie Barney was an expatriate American writer who lived in Paris. In her home at 20 rue Jacob, Barney established a salon that for over sixty years brought together intellectuals and artists. In 1927, in response to the exclusively male French Academy, she formed the Académie des Femmes to organize and promote women writers.
Berg, Alban
Authors: Headlam David
Published: September 2018

Composer Alban Berg (1885–1935) is best-known for his two operas, Wozzeck (premiered 1925) and Lulu (left unfinished but performed in incomplete form until the full premiere in 1979, as completed by Friedrich Cerha) and his Violin Concerto (premiered 1936). Berg’s oeuvre consists of his opi 1–7 and then, without opus numbers, pre-Opus 1 songs, incomplete pieces, and arrangements, added by archival and sketch study.
Borderline (1930)
Authors: Nieland Justus
Published: September 2018

An experimental production of an avant-garde collective of poets and artists known as the POOL group, Borderline is a key example of modernist montage techniques in the service of elusive subjective realities, and a fascinating, if frought, intertwining of sexual and racial politics in the interwar period. Written and directed by the Englishman Kenneth Macpherson, Borderline resulted from a collaboration between Macpherson, his wife Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), and Bryher’s lesbian partner and celebrated imagist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), with whom Macpherson was himself having an affair. As the POOL group, this romantically entangled trio operated as a publishing house for modernist and avant-garde artists and intellectuals associated with the landmark periodical Close-Up (1927–33), the first English journal devoted to the study of film as art. They also collaborated on three short experimental films in the late 1920s before embarking on Borderline, an ambitious, silent feature. Shot in Switzerland, where POOL was based, and funded by the Ellerman family fortune, Borderline stars a vamping H.D. as well as the legendary African American actor and activist Paul Robeson, in his second film role since his remarkable screen debut in Oscar Micheaux’s Body and Soul (1924). Set in and around a hotel in a small, European mountain village, the film’s fragmented narrative centers on a then-sensational topic—an interracial affair between Adah, played by Robeson’s own wife Eslanda, and Thorne, a neurotic white man. Borderline’s experimental editing patterns, which reflect the POOL group’s interest in Russian montage techniques and the psychic rhythms and ruptures of the Freudian unconscious, radically fragment temporal and special continuity to limn the emotional fallout of the affair on Thorne’s wife Astrid (H.D.) and Adah’s husband Pete (‘A Negro,’ as the script has it), played by Robeson. Within the film, Pete falls victim to the town’s climate of xenophobia and racism, which the film critiques, often by juxtaposing it with the queer cosmopolitanism and liberated eros of the hotel bar. Formally, however, Pete/Robeson is subjected to the film-makers’ modernist Primitivism, betrayed in compositions and framings that link him to sublime nature and stoic carnality, and differentiate him—as body—from the neurotic and hysterical white characters, whose mental life is the film’s chief concern. Borderline thus redraws as many boundaries as it seeks to transgress.
Brik, Osip (1888–1945)
Authors: Reeve Charles
Published: September 2018

Osip Maksimovich (Meerovich) Brik (Осип Максимович Брик) was a prominent Soviet poet and critic, editor of Left Front of the Arts (LEF) and a founding member of OPOYAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language). His role in Soviet Constructivism and Futurism emerges neatly in Alexander Rodchenko’s famous photomontage of the critic. Replacing the left lens of Brik’s glasses with the letters ‘ЛЕФ’ (in reference to Левый фронт искусств, or LEF, the magazine that Brik ran with the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky from 1923–25), Rodchenko underscores three fundamental elements of Brik’s persona: the emphasis on the photograph as construction underscores Brik’s interest, following Roman Jakobson, in the cultural product’s materiality (Fer 124); the image captures Brik’s LEF-tinted world view (abandon handicraft for industrial process; eschew genius for collectivity; forego fiction); and, being known more for Rodchenko’s artistry than for Brik’s visage, it captures Brik’s deference to artists and writers – most notoriously to Mayakovsky. Brik celebrated Mayakovsky’s work in his essays and also shared his wife, Lilya Yuryevna Brik, née Kagan, with whom Brik had an open marriage, with the poet. The three cohabited from 1919. Though certain biographical elements of Brik’s personal history remain controversial, it is known that Brik came from a Moscow merchant family, studied law and, with his wife, worked for the Cheka (the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Profiteering and Corruption), a forerunner of the KGB, for at least part of the 1920s (Kurchanova 54). After LEF, Brik became involved with Novyi LEF (1927–28; ‘New LEF’), though not as an editor, directed INKhUK (the Institute of Artistic Culture) and helped organize VKhUTEMAS (The All-State Artistic-Technical Workshops). He consistently emphasized the importance of the cultural product’s materiality, but shifted from supporting artistic freedom to arguing that art must serve the state (Kurchanova 73).
Ernst, Max (1891–1976)
Authors: Rex Bethany
Published: September 2018

Max Ernst was a painter, sculptor and printmaker. He was born in Germany, but he lived in Paris and then New York; he returned to France in the 1960s. An encounter with Ernst’s work reveals an unconventional frame of reference marked by a ceaseless search for new forms of expression — forms capable of responding to an era of fragmentation and a loss of faith in the Enlightenment ideals of reason and progress. Ernst was an early leader of Dadaism in Cologne and a central member of the surrealist movement. Indeed, his work is full of intentional contradictions and red herrings, yet it is possible to detect technical and thematic foci throughout his oeuvre: birds, forests, petrified cities and the natural sciences. In order to give form to the visions of his unconscious mind, Ernst developed a number of semi-automatic methods of creation: ‘grattage’ (scraping paint from the canvas); ‘frottage’ (taking rubbings); ‘decalcomania’ (a form of image transfer); and ‘oscillation’ (swinging a pierced paint can so as to drip paint on the canvas). His approach was partly derived from Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) psychoanalytic theories, an influence shared by the surrealists Paul Éluard (1895–1952) and André Breton (1896–1966). Taking war as his primordial experience, Ernst wrestled with multiple forms of expression to produce an extensive and enigmatic body of work that limns the experience of living in a period of bewildering social and political upheaval.
Gris, Juan (1887–1927)
Authors: Moss Sarah
Published: September 2018

The Spanish artist Juan Gris (born José Victoriano Carmelo Carlos González Pérez) is widely recognized, alongside Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, as one of the key pioneers of Cubism. Despite a career overshadowed by Picasso and Braque, Gris developed a style of Analytic and Synthetic Cubism quite unique to that of his contemporaries.
Owen, Wilfred (1893–1918)
Authors: Beauchesne Nicholas
Published: September 2018

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen (1893–1918) is among the most renowned British poets of the First World War (1914–1918). His style can best be described as elegiac or tragic, standing defiantly against the idealized or propagandistic depictions of the battlefield prevalent during the ‘Great War’s early stages. In opposition to the sentiments of Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) and Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), and more akin to those of Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918) and Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), Owen considered such reductive glorifications of mass slaughter ignorant, if not outright dishonest — a radical viewpoint at the time.

Owen’s influences range from Dante and Shakespeare to Thomas Gray, William Collins, Percy B. Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Burns, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and especially John Keats. Owen’s poetic signature and chief innovation was his subversion of traditional rhyme schemes. He experimented with consonantal end-rhyme (or ‘pararhyme’), a technique that, along with Edmund Blunden (1896–1974), he helped popularize. Critic Sasi Bhusan Das interprets Owen’s use of this technique, in conjunction with broken rhythms, as an effort to capture ‘the disharmony of the [Great] War’ (13).
Klimt, Gustav (1862–1918)
Authors: Jordon Sharon
Published: September 2018

Gustav Klimt had an indelible influence on the artistic and cultural innovations that occurred in Vienna at the turn of the century. He was a founding member and public figurehead for the city’s Secession, an organization responsible for exhibitions that introduced the public to the latest developments in European modern art. His associations with leading members of the city’s cultural and intellectual elite, and his collaborations with leading artists, architects, and designers resulted in many important artworks.

In 1876, at age 14, Klimt enrolled at the recently founded Kunstgewerbeschule (Imperial and Royal School of Applied Arts and Crafts), where he spent seven years. Klimt soon established his reputation for large paintings in public buildings as part of the redevelopment of the Ringstrasse: a series on the history of theatre for the new Burgtheater (Imperial Court Theatre), 1886–1888, was followed by murals in the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Art Museum), 1891, featuring female personifications of the arts of ancient cultures, showing Klimt’s growing interest in women as a primary subject in his work. Klimt received the Emperor’s prize for his realist painting Auditorium Theatre (1888), which includes more than 100 portraits of leading Viennese citizens making up the theatre’s audience.
Mumford, Lewis (1895–1990)
Authors: Taylor Tatum
Published: September 2018

Lewis Mumford was a prolific author, social philosopher and prominent American critic of architecture and Urbanism. A native of New York City, he penned a column on architecture that was published in The New Yorker from 1931 to 1975, extending his work to a broad audience. He evaluated the built world based on its relationship to its inhabitants and the natural environment, disregarding physical design and the development of a ‘modern’ style in favor of social functionality. Primarily concerned with the role of technology within civilization, he criticized the dehumanizing effects of mechanization.
Einstein, Albert (1879–1955)
Authors: Sheehan Paul
Published: September 2018

Born in Ulm, Württemberg (now Germany), Einstein was a theoretical physicist who initiated a scientific revolution with his theory of general relativity. Challenging classical mechanics and its basis in Newtonian science, Einstein replaced the Euclidean model of geometry with four-dimensional spacetime and, from the axiom of the absolute speed of light, logically deduced the relativity of time. Subsequent to the advent of relativity theory, there is no longer any absolute temporal metric for defining the real. Einstein published two seminal papers, "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper" (1905; "The Special Theory of Relativity") and "Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie" (1916; "The General Theory of Relativity"), and in 1921 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. His name and iconic visage have become synonymous with modern science, leaving an ineradicable imprint on 20th-century culture far beyond the enclaves of scientific research, a status partly achieved by his willingness to popularize his work. Einstein made lasting contributions to gravitational field theory, astrophysics and quantum mechanics, and much fame has accrued around his groundbreaking formula E = mc2, with its articulation of mass-energy equivalence. But it is with the theory and concept of time-relativity that Einstein’s thought crosses over into cultural and aesthetic modernism.