bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Yamanaka, Sadao (1909–1938)
Authors: Gerow Aaron
Published: September 2018

Sadao Yamanaka was a Japanese film director known for bringing a modern, critical touch to period films in the 1930s. Born in Kyoto, he entered the film industry in 1927 and directed his first film at age 22. He soon became known for his deviations from the period film genre, presenting samurai who avoided violence or, when he transitioned to sound, dialogue in modern Japanese. His stories could vary from the parodic (Tange Sazen yowa: Hyakumanryo no tsubo [The Million Ryo Pot, 1935]) to the tragic (Machi no irezumimono [The Town’s Tattooed Man, 1935]), but his film style, while drawing much from Hollywood continuity editing, developed a poetic and humanistic concern for the material conditions of everyday life.
Dieste, Eladio (1917–2000)
Authors: Castaings Marcos
Published: September 2018

The Uruguayan engineer Eladio Dieste was trained at the School of Engineering of the University of the Republic at Montevideo, where he taught mathematics and mechanics. Approximating modernity to a vernacular register, altogether critical of internationalisation, he worked with specific material, economic and social conditions, notably with the use of brick, developing innovative techniques in masonry construction that lead to the so-called ‘second revolution in masonry vaulting.’ With the firm Dieste & Montañez, that he founded in 1954, he designed sport-facilities, warehouses, horizontal silos, and other industrial facilities, two churches and his own house, all examples of his most famous motto: ‘there is nothing more noble and elegant than resistance through form’ (Eladio Dieste, 2009: 31–56; 46). Among other texts, he published the essays Architecture and Construction, The Awareness of Form, and Art, People, Technocracy, where he analysed the intersections between architecture and engineering – on the same line used by D. P. Billington to define the idea of structural art, interpretive canon of his work– together with a rhetoric and aesthetic impulse very much moulded upon a strong Jesuit tradition.
League of Nations (1919–1946)
Authors: Day Patrick V. , Pecora Vincent P.
Published: September 2018

The League of Nations (1919–1946) was an intergovernmental organisation formed after World War I to mediate disputes among its member nations through diplomacy and collective security. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (who coined the term) and Lord James Bryce first proposed the League in Great Britain on the eve of World War I, and the idea attracted a group of like-minded pacifist thinkers. In America, President William Howard Taft promoted the League and, after the war, President Woodrow Wilson embraced the cause. Wilson saw it as a way to ameliorate and resolve future national conflicts without war.
Malinowski, Bronisław Kasper (1884–1942)
Authors: Beard David
Published: September 2018

Born Bronisław Kasper Malinowski to a family in the Polish nobility (the szlachta), Malinowski made contributions to anthropology through his text Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) and to linguistic anthropology in Coral Gardens and their Magic (1935). Travelling to the Trobriand Islands, Malinowski documented the life, customs and traditions of Melanesian people using systematic observation in ethnographic field notes and photography. This rich description of the Trobrianders set the standard for scientific ethnographic practice in his book A Scientific Theory of Culture (1944).
Plaatje, Solomon Tshekisho (1876–1932)
Authors: Haire Karen
Published: September 2018

Born in 1876 in the rural Free State, Sol Plaatje is descended from the Barolong boo-Modiboa, royals who had been deposed in the 1500s. The Plaatje grandfather had converted to Christianity and Sol was educated by Berlin missionaries, who were astonished at the brilliance of this child prodigy. Although he received formal schooling only up to Standard Four, through self-study he went on to become a court interpreter, and then a career journalist. He used the press to plead for political rights, and when conditions worsened for Africans under the Union in 1910, he travelled with two SANNC (South African Native National Congress) delegations to England, one just before and one just after World War I, to publicise his people’s plight. During his long absences, often with lapses in SANNC financial support, his wife, Elizabeth Lillith Plaatje, struggled to provide for their family. According to biographer and close friend, Seetsele Modiri Molema, overwork as well as financial worries caused his untimely death.
Scheler, Max (1874–1928)
Authors: Peterson Paul Silas
Published: September 2018

Scheler was a philosopher in the phenomenological school. His mother was Jewish; his father was Protestant. In high school he became a Catholic but abandoned formal religion in 1922. He studied with Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, and Rudolf Eucken. His early research was on transcendental philosophy. From 1900 to 1906 he was an outside lecturer (Privatdozent) in Jena and here engaged the work of Edmund Husserl. He was later active in Munich and Gottingen and from 1917 to 1918 at the German Foreign Ministry in Geneva and The Hague. From 1919 onward he was the director of the Institute for Social Sciences in Cologne.
al-Khāl, Yūsuf (1917–1987)
Authors: Badini Dounia
Published: September 2018

Yūsuf al-Khāl was a Lebanese poet and writer, born in 1917 in Syria. He graduated in 1944 from the Philosophy Department at the American University of Beirut where he taught Arabic literature. In 1948 he went to America where he became involved with renewal literary circles. In 1955, he went back to Lebanon with a well-conceived purpose of announcing a second Arab poetic renaissance. In 1957, he founded the magazine Shi‘r (Poetry), which ran until 1964, then from 1967 to 1970. Shi‘r was the most professional avant-garde Arabic magazine dedicated to poetry. Through it, he took pains to support new experimental poetry that aimed to change the poetic language, making it closer to spoken language in terms of the lexicon, structures, and music; to make modernity accessible to the Arab reader through translations of foreign experiences; to renew the themes of poetry by expressing enriching personal experiences. Although he published several works (a novel, a play, poetry, essays, and translations), he is recognized above all as the leader of the modernist Shi‘r movement.
d’Annunzio, Gabriele (1863–1938)
Authors: Santi Mara
Published: September 2018

Gabriele d’Annunzio, Italian poet, novelist, short story writer, dramatist, journalist, essayist, and scriptwriter, was a leading Italian author in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since 1914, he also played an active role in Italian politics and became a national war hero and ideologist of the nationalists. His nonconformist model of aesthetic life (life as a work of art), his successful literary career, his political engagement in the Great War, and even his scandalous affairs surrounded his life with a legendary aura and contributed to making him one of the most striking personalities of the period in Italy, where he was and still is called, by antonomasia, the ‘Vate’ (the Bard).
Goswami, Joy (1954–)
Authors: Mukhopadhyay Sumanta
Published: September 2018

Joy Goswami has been one of the most popular and versatile of contemporary Bengali poets. In his 32 collections of poems he has experimented with almost all available literary forms and styles. Besides numerous political pamphlets and volumes of critical notes, Joy has written 14 novels and several short stories marked by innovative and unconventional use of language and form.
Opperman, Diederik Johannes (1914–1985)
Authors: du Plooy Heilna
Published: September 2018

Dirk Opperman is known as a poet whose poetry is deeply concerned with Africa as a physical and symbolic space. As a dominant poetic figure from the late 1940s until his death, he exerted great influence in the sphere of Afrikaans literature as advisor on new manuscripts for publishers and as editor of comprehensive, canonizing collections of poetry. He also exerted great influence on young poets for whom he provided training in his so-called ‘literary laboratory’ in Stellenbosch.
Qabbani, Nizar (‏نزار توفيق قباني‎‪) (1923-1998)
Authors: Luce Mark D.
Published: September 2018

Nizar Qabbani (1923–98) was born in Damascus, Syria, into a merchant family. He studied law at Damascus University and then entered the Syrian diplomatic service, where he served in embassies in Cairo, Ankara, Beirut, London, Beijing, and Madrid.

He retired in 1966, moved to Beirut and opened a publishing company. Qabbani was one of the most famous and influential poets of his time. He is known for his sensual and romantic poetry. He used poetry as a form of resistance to advocate for social freedoms for women and fused romantic themes with themes of political despair. Not only were his poems published, but they were popularized by Lebanese and Syrian singers who set his lyrics to music.
Smith, Pauline (1882–1959)
Authors: Meihuizen Nicholas
Published: September 2018

Pauline Smith was born in Oudtshoorn, in the Little Karoo, South Africa. Her beloved father, who was the first resident physician of the area, died when she was 16, after she had been sent to boarding school in Scotland. Memories of the landscape and people of the Little Karoo remained with her throughout her life, though she spent most of it from 1895 onward in Britain and Europe. She developed a close friendship with Arnold Bennett, who helped her establish herself as a writer, giving her guidance and encouragement, being infallible in his perception of her strong points as a writer.
Takamura, Kôtarô (高村光太郎) (1883–1956)
Authors: Peters John
Published: September 2018

Takamura Kôtarô was a sculptor, poet, and essayist associated with several important modern Japanese art and literature movements, including the Folk Art (Mingei) and White Birch (Shirakaba) movements. The son of sculptor Takamura Kôun (1852–1934), Takamura studied both sculpting and oil painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Art. After graduating in 1906, he travelled to New York, London, and Paris, learning widely about Western art movements and aesthetics. After returning to Japan in 1908, he authored ‘Green Sun’ (Midori iro no taiyô), a famous essay which argued for the inalienable right of an artist to absolute freedom of self-expression.
Vijayan, O.V. (1930–2005)
Authors: Panikkar Chitra
Published: September 2018

O.V. Vijayan was a writer, thinker, political observer, and cartoonist, born in Palakkad, Kerala and rose to prominence with his first novel, Khasakkinte Itihasam (The Legends of Khasak, 1969). Such was the influence of this novel on the minds of the readers that the whole of modern Malayalam fiction came to be defined in terms of a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ in relation to it. Khasakkinte Ithihasam tells the story of a young, brilliant astrophysics student, Ravi—an agnostic, who leaves a promising career to take up a primary teacher’s job in a remote village called Khasak, immerses himself in the bewitching sensuousness of its rustic, amoral world, only to emerge an involved outsider and succumb to a self-invited death.
Hung, Tung (1920–1987)
Authors: McIntyre Sophie
Published: September 2018

Hung Tung (Hong Tong) was a self-taught artist from Taiwan who rose to prominence during the 1970s. His naïve, intricate, and vibrant paintings are rich in symbolism and were inspired by Taiwanese folklore traditions and Taoist philosophy. Hung’s work is believed to convey a strong sense of Taiwanese consciousness, and it is often associated with the 1970s ‘Native Soil’ (Hsiang-tu/ Xiangtu 鄉土) Movement. Rejecting the orthodoxy of Chinese ink painting, Hung developed his own unique pictorial language and his work has played an important role in the history of Taiwan art. Born in Tainan County in southern Taiwan, Hung was an illiterate farmer.
Stepanova, Varvara Fedorovna (1894–1958)
Authors: Railing Patricia
Published: September 2018

Varvara Stepanova was a Russian artist. Although she made her mark as an innovative painter in Moscow exhibitions (1920), Stepanova became particularly well known as a designer. Between 1921 and the late 1940s, she designed sets and costumes for theatre and film (1922–6), textiles and practical clothing for both women and men (thus creating a ‘new look’ for the new Soviet citizen, 1924), and taught textile design at the art school VKhUTEMAS in Moscow beginning in 1923. Under commissions from the State, Stepanova developed various designs to establish an aesthetic for the Soviet regime, including designs of books, magazines, journals, and the celebration albums of the 1930s and 1940s. This new look was largely determined by geometrical models, including circular patterns using a pair of compasses, linear designs using a ruler, contrasts of light and dark, repeating patterns inspired by film, and, more generally, the aesthetic potential of simple geometric lines and shapes. Stepanova assimilated the human figure, photomontage, and pure design into a visual whole made possible by her modernist method of creating with geometrical models. This was the Constructivist process, and its principles were described by Stepanova in her articles ‘On Non-Objectivity Creativity in Painting’ (1919), ‘On the Possibility of Cognizing Art’ (1920), ‘Construction’ (1920), ‘On Constructivism’ (1921), ‘On Facture’ (1922), ‘Photomontage’ (1928), ‘Draft Syllabus for a Course in Artistic Composition in the Textile’ (c.1925), ‘From Clothing to Pattern and Fabric’ (1929), and ‘How We Worked on The First Cavalry’ (1936).
Zelaya Sierra, Pablo (1896–1933)
Authors: Larach Gustavo
Published: September 2018

Pablo Zelaya Sierra was one the earliest Honduran artists to engage in modernist pictorial practices. He was still a teenager when he travelled by foot from his native rural hometown to Tegucigalpa, Managua, and San José, sojourning in each of these Central American capitals in search of exchanges with other artists. In 1920, funding from the Honduran government allowed him to start studies at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid, where he studied under Manuel Benedito, a student of Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, and also under Daniel Vásquez Díaz. During his years in Europe (1920–32), Zelaya became conversant with modernist pictorial languages, particularly Post-Impressionism, while also an adept draughtsman and painter of academic pictures.
Massine, Léonide (1896–1979)
Authors: Straus Rachel
Published: September 2018

Russian-born Léonide Massine’s career flourished in the cities of Western Europe, where he made his name as a lead dancer and choreographer for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (1909–29). Massine’s choreographic development coincided with and helped to define the Ballets Russes’s modernist period. As Diaghilev’s protégé, Massine absorbed principles of Cubism and Futurism, consequently developing an angular, distorted movement style, heralded for its intensity and polyrhythmic complexity, along with its satiric and cinematic elements. Massine’s Parade (1917), in collaboration with Pablo Picasso (decor and costumes), Erik Satie (music), and Jean Cocteau (libretto), is recognized as a landmark of ballet modernism. Like other modernists, Massine incorporated national and folk material (commedia dell’arte to flamenco) and popular theater forms (including film) as tools for creative innovation. Following his departure from the Ballets Russes, Massine became interested in formalism and abstraction, which he expressed in a series of symphonic ballets. The most recognized dance artist of the 1920s and 1930s, Massine’s magnificent presence as a performer, even an aging one, can be seen in the film The Red Shoes (1947).
Rilke, Rainer Maria (1875–1926)
Authors: Schreurs Bert
Published: September 2018

Rilke was a preeminent German-speaking poet of the beginning of the twentieth century. His early poetical works were still conventional and bathed in neoromantic sentimentality. In Das Stundenbuch (The Book of Hours, 1899–1903) he found his own voice, praising a pantheistic god as the immanent principle of life in all things. Under the influence of the sculptor Rodin and the painter Cézanne he wrote Neue Gedichte (New Poems, 1902–07), his so-called "thing poems," in which he tried to view the essence of a thing, turning it into a symbol for an unknown inner reality. His disturbing experience of human misery in Paris was reflected in Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1904–10). After completing this novel, which took the form of a diary, he fell into a deep crisis, as he came to doubt whether at all the poetic word could disclose reality. Regaining that belief, Rilke in later years tried to preserve the lyrical expressiveness of poetry and the visible forms of things, for example in his Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies, 1912–22), in which he addressed a numinous angel as a symbol for the ineffable. In his final works, which include Die Sonette an Orpheus (The Sonnets to Orpheus, 1922) he tried to spiritualize the world through the poetic word.
Shklovsky, Viktor (1893–1984)
Authors: Spiropoulou Angeliki
Published: September 2018

Born in St Petersburg, Russia, Victor Borisovich Shklovsky (or Shklovskii; Ви́ктор Бори́сович Шкло́вский) was a literary critic, autobiographical novelist, and a leading figure of Russian Formalism (1910–30). A charter founder of OPOYAZ (The Society for the Study of Poetic Language, 1917), he was also associated with the Moscow Linguistic Circle, and contemporary avant-garde writers, such as the Serapion Brothers and the Russian Futurists, especially the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), all of whom similarly emphasized literature as language against the moralizing idealism of Symbolist poetics and Impressionist criticism prevalent in pre-Revolution Russia. However, Formalism was later attacked as "decadent" aestheticism, and Shklovsky was forced to compromise. In his much quoted essay "Art as Device" (1917), a "manifesto of the Formalist method" (Eichenbaum 1965: 113), Shklovsky posits the autonomy of literature and affirms the Formalist pursuit of the immanent, scientific study of the "literariness" of literature derived from its distinctive language and techniques instead of its content, resonating with modernist aesthetics. Here he develops the concept of "estrangement" or "defamiliarization" ( ostraneniye ) as both the aim and method of all art, self-reflexively impeding the automatism of our perception. Renamed as the "alienation effect" or "distancing effect" (Verfremdungseffekt) and endowed with a political function, "estrangement" became the foundational technique of Bertolt Brecht‘s epic theater.
Synaesthesia
Authors: Dimova Polina
Published: September 2018

Synaesthesia is the confusion or conflation of sensory modalities, where one sense is experienced or described in terms of another as in Charles Baudelaire’s simile "perfumes sweet as oboes, green as prairies." Synaesthesia captures an already existing tendency in language to blend the senses as in "sweet melody," "velvety voice," or "loud colors," and psychologists have conducted studies that show our shared experience of weak audiovisual associations between low pitch and darker colors, or high pitch and lighter colors. In a strictly neurological sense, synaesthesia is a perceptual condition in which the stimulation of one sensory system (for example, hearing) triggers sensations in another sensory system (for example, vision). Cross-sensory associations form one-to-one correspondences that are stable, delicately nuanced, and highly individual. For instance, a synaesthete may experience the timbre of violins as lime green, or the pitch A as burgundy. Synaesthetic associations occur as involuntary, automatic, and emotional responses to sensory stimuli. They persist throughout life and often aid memory: some synaesthetes reliably remember historical dates thanks to their color-to-number associations. The prevalence of synaesthesia has been contested over time, with varying ratios of synaesthetes to nonsynaesthetes of 1 in 2,000, 1 in 100 for colored letters and numbers in recent studies, and even 1 in 23 for all types of synaesthesia.
Van Wyk, Christopher (1957–2014)
Authors: Masemola Kgomotso
Published: September 2018

Born in Baragwanath, Soweto, Chris van Wyk proved an influential figure on the South African literary scene. Associated with the Black Consciousness movement, his volume of poems titled It Is Time to Go Home (1979) won the Olive Schreiner Prize of 1980. In the same year he would begin his five-year term as editor of Staffrider journal, which proved such an important outlet for the black protest poetry of the period. He launched Wietie magazine, which sought to provide a platform to recuperate the Sophiatown argot known as tsotsitaal or gangster-speak. The venture was not successful, but demonstrated his skill at crossing cultural and racial boundaries through linguistic means, a type of textual experimentalism not without a foundation in lived experience. Linguistic play can also be seen, for instance, in the title of his 2004 memoir, Shirley, Goodness & Mercy: A Childhood Memoir, a Joycean title, based on the punning of proper names.
Wu Xiaobang (吴晓邦) (1906–95)
Authors: Wilcox Emily E.
Published: September 2018

Wu Xiaobang, known in China as "the father of Chinese new dance," was the most important pioneer of modern dance in twentieth-century China. Exposed to German and American modern dance and ballet in Japan in the 1930s, Wu devoted his life to promoting dance for the use of patriotic and leftist political causes, as well as to the documentation and study of Chinese religious and folk dance. Wu founded the first Chinese-run modern dance school in Shanghai in the early 1930s, and in 1937 he joined the "National Salvation" movement traveling around war-torn China as an activist-choreographer and performer. Exile Trilogy, Song of the Guerillas, and March of the Volunteers, among more than fifty original works created in 1937–8, are Wu’s trademark dance works. As one of two instructors of the Dance Cadre Training Course held in Beijing in 1951–2, Wu shaped a generation of dance leaders in China. He founded the Chinese Dance Art Research Society in 1954 and the Sky Horse (Tianma) Dance Art Studio in 1957. Wu was appointed Chairman of the China Dancers Association and founding member of the Dance Research Institute in 1978, and in 1982 he became first advisor to master of the arts in dance programs in China.
Al-Afghani, Jamal al-Din جمال الدين الافغاني (1838–97)
Authors: Luce Mark D.
Published: September 2018

Jamal al-Din Al-Afghani (1838–1897) is considered the "father of Islamic Modernism." As a philosopher, writer, orator, and journalist, Al-Afghani affected Islamic thought from the Indian subcontinent, to Iran and the Middle East. He advocated for national liberation and was the founder of the revivalist movement, which later gave rise to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Of Iranian origin, Al-Afghani traveled widely, spending time and working in Afghanistan, India, Iraq, Egypt, and Istanbul. His preaching and writings called for a Muslim revival, an abandonment of fatalism, and the application of intellect to work for freedom. He urged students to use journalism as a tool in the fight: to influence minds. He denounced Muslim rulers who opposed reform. Al-Afghani envisioned Muslims being governed in one state, free from Western imperialism, and reviving the past glories of Islam. He pioneered an Islamic awakening for Muslims through his writings, teachings, speeches, and political organizations, which sparked anti-imperialist, reformist, and pan-Islamic political activities.
Al-Naqqāsh, Mārūn مارون النقاش (1817–55)
Authors: Berg Lovisa
Published: September 2018

Mārūn Al-Naqqāsh is often seen as the father of modern Arabic drama. He was born in Sidon, but grew up in Beirut. After a traditional education comprising detailed studies of Arabic language and literature as well as law and foreign languages Al-Naqqāsh decided to travel. His first journeys took him to Damascus and Aleppo, and then in 1846 he traveled to Egypt and Italy. In Italy he became fascinated with European theater and on his return to Beirut he decided to write and produce a play. Drawing on his deep knowledge of Arabic culture in addition to influences from his journeys, Al-Naqqāsh produced Al-bakhīl (The Miser, 1847).
Athenaeum, The
Authors: Gasston Aimee
Published: September 2018

The Athenaeum, "A Journal of Literature, Science, and the Arts," was published weekly in London between 1828 and 1921. John Middleton Murray was appointed as editor in 1919, recruiting Aldous Huxley as his assistant. The magazine featured cultural, scientific, and political commentary, reviews, literary gossip, as well as original poetry and short stories. Contributors included Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Wyndham Lewis, Paul Valéry, Ezra Pound, and members of the Bloomsbury set, such as Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry.

Eliot produced essays such as "The Perfect Critic" for the magazine between 1919 and 1920 while working on The Waste Land, quoting writers like Joseph Conrad and James Joyce alongside canonical references. Mansfield was also employed regularly at this time, reviewing the work of contemporaries such as Woolf, May Sinclair, and Dorothy Richardson, as well as collaborating on translations of Chekhov’s letters. The magazine was the first to publish Woolf’s short story "Solid Objects," and to host an early exposition of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
Bresciani, Valdés, Castillo, Huidobro (BVCH)
Authors: Celedon Forster Alejandra
Published: September 2018

The architectural practice composed by the architects Carlos Bresciani, Hector Valdés, Fernando Castillo y Carlos Huidobro (BVCH) dominated the national scene in the fifties and sixties. The initial group gathered in 1942, originally composed by Valdés, Castillo and Huidobro (VCH), in 1953 joined Bresciani. Their individual careers, spanning well into the nineties, are also extremely significant. Once the modern ideals were more absorbed in the country, the firm managed to put into practice certain principles and modes of production which represents a different architectonic attitude to that of the first half of the century. While the Chilean modernism of early twentieth century was mainly concerned about the construction of public monumental buildings, this second half opens a second trend of development. Along with the building of institutions, central to Chile’s modernity was the construction of social housing. Socially engaged, BVCH architectural practice had a central role in this thread.
Neue Sachlichkeit in Architecture
Authors: Poppelreuter Tanja
Published: September 2018

The term Neue Sachlichkeit was coined by Gustav Hartlaub with his exhibition: ‘Neue Sachlichkeit. Deutsche Malerei seit dem Expressionismus’ (New Objectivity. German Painting Since Expressionism) at the Kunsthalle Mannheim in 1925 and is now used to describe a movement during the politically, socially, and economically unstable years of the Weimar Republic in Germany (1919–1933) that includes painting, photography, design, and architecture (Rewald, 2006).

In architecture the term mainly relates to Neues Bauen (New Building) and avant-garde currents of rationalist and functionalist Modernism that existed alongside conservative counterparts and Expressionism. Among its contributors in Germany were Walter Gropius, Otto Haesler, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Ernst May, Hannes Meyer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Martin Wagner. Architecture and design was created in order to fulfill objective functions and not along the lines of personal taste, preexisting historical, national, or regional styles. The Sache–the object, subject matter–was scrutinized in order to fulfill its function and serve its user best as possible. The way in which this was approached was sachlich–objectively and factually–without emotional attachment to ways in which the object was designed or used previously. Neue Sachlichkeit therefore was an approach to design pursuing, but not always achieving, practicality, suitability, and objectivity by setting aside all matters considered by its practitioners as irrelevant (Schwartz, 1998 and Schmalenbach, 1940).
Angura
Authors: Swain John D.
Published: September 2018

Angura has been called the most effective fusion of art and politics from Japan’s turbulent years of social protest in the 1960s and 1970s. Angura is the Japanese contraction for the term ‘andaaguraundo engeki,’ or ‘underground theatre.’ Although Japan borrowed the term ‘underground’ from the counterculture movement in the U.S. and England in the 1960s and applied the word to many different aspects of evolving youth culture, the contraction angura refers only to the theatre form. Some scholars conflate ‘angura’ with ‘shōgekijō-undō’ (‘the little theatre movement’), while others argue the two are separate movements within the same stream of counterculture theatre beginning in 1960.

The aesthetic genesis of angura was the growing dissatisfaction of Japan’s first post-WWII generation with shingeki. The generation that came of age in the late 1950s and 1960s was hungry for alternate forms of theatrical expression. In the political arena, that same generation was mobilized by opposition to renewals of the Japan/U.S. Security Treaty in 1960 and 1970. Although angura gave highly effective artistic voice to the politics opposing treaty renewal, the fusion of art and politics in angura covers a wide spectrum that includes apolitical authors and directors such as Betsuyaku Minoru (b. 1937) and Terayama Shūji (1935–83). Others at the heart of the angura phenomenon are Kara Jūrō (b. 1940), Suzuki Tadashi (b. 1939), Ōta Shōgo (1939–2007), and Satoh Makoto (b. 1943).
Arab-American Theater
Authors: Najjar Michael Malek
Published: September 2018

Arab-American Theater is a general term that describes plays and performances by Americans of Arab descent written in Arabic and/or English from the early twentieth century onward. This modernist movement breaks from Arab performance modes such as storytelling (hakawati), improvised poetry (zajal), and traditional dance forms (raqs-al-sharqi). These playwrights have adopted modern playwriting styles that combine Arab and Arab-American subject matter with American playwriting forms such as monodramas and one-act and two-act Realist plays. Although these plays are not generally experimental in nature, there is no doubt that the early Arab American playwrights Kahlil Gibran, Ameen Fares Rihani, and Mikhail Naimy all contributed to what is known as al-Nahda, or the modern Arabic literary renaissance, which had a lasting impact on Arab arts and letters throughout the twentieth century. These plays are also forms of resistance literature that serve as protest against colonialist and neo-imperialist actions undertaken by foreign powers against Arab nations. Lastly, these plays are forms of what sociologists Omi and Winant call ‘cultural nationalism’—that is, a community focus on cultural elements that define collective identity and ‘peoplehood.’ Arab-American Theater has contributed to a re-articulation of Arab American identity that emphasizes hybridity and dual allegiances.
Valle-Inclán, Ramón María Del (1866–1936)
Authors: Sprinceana Iulia
Published: September 2018

The Spanish dramatist, novelist, and poet Ramón del Valle-Inclán was a major figure of the Generation of 1898, a group of writers that reinvigorated Spanish letters in the wake of the Spanish-American War of 1898, which marked the end of Spain’s colonial empire. Valle-Inclán was one of the most radical dramatists of the early twentieth century and worked to subvert the traditionalism of Spanish drama. Influenced by French modernism and Symbolism, he later moved to more experimental styles and is known for the creation of the ‘esperento,’ an absurd and grotesquely satirical mix of comedy and tragedy. This style expresses the tragic meaning of Spanish life, which Valle considered to be a ‘grotesque deformation’ of European civilization. He held several administrative and teaching appointments, which allowed him to dedicate his life to writing while providing for his wife and five children.
Eurhythmics
Authors: Odom Selma Landen
Published: September 2018

Eurhythmics, a coined word meaning ‘good’ or ‘right rhythm’, is the English name for the interactive approach to music education developed in the early 1900s by Swiss teacher-composer Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950). He is often called Dalcroze, the pseudonym he adopted in his youth. The Dalcroze method, named variously in countries where the teaching spread, combines movement and ear training with physical, vocal, and instrumental improvisation. Teachers improvise at the piano but also use composed music and recordings to lead their classes, while participants listen, move, and sing to follow, responding immediately in the moment. Games and exercises include walking and stepping rhythms, swaying and swinging, using body percussion such as clapping, musical conducting, playing hand instruments, bouncing balls, ‘sculpting’ phrases in space, and devising ‘plastiques’ or realizations of musical works. Through the artistry of Dalcroze lessons, people shape and time personal movement within collective music activities. Learning to notate music builds on embodied experience followed by reflection and analysis. The teaching imparts musical elements, forms, and styles, usually from Western classical and folk traditions but increasingly from jazz and world sources. The purposeful, motivating music that Dalcroze-trained teachers improvise is the key tool of this distinct pedagogy. Many educators contribute to the enrichment and expansion of Dalcroze practices in the twenty-first century.
Saariaho, Kaija (1952–)
Authors: Renaud Mitch
Published: September 2018

Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho initially studied in Helsinki before moving on to Freiberg where she studied with Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber among others. In 1982 she moved to Paris and began to work regularly at the musical research centre IRCAM. Early in her career she collaborated with Magnus Lindberg and Esa-Pekka Salonen to form the Finish new music ensemble Korvat Auki! (Ears Open!).
Apollinaire, Guillaume (1880–1918)
Authors: Thomson Tara  S.
Published: September 2018

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) was a poet, literary and art critic, playwright, novelist, editor, and journalist. Born in Rome to a Polish-Russian mother and an unknown father, Apollinaire’s birth name was Guglielmo Alberto Wladimiro Alessandro Apollinare de Kostrowitzky, though his family called him Wilhelm (the German form of the Italian Guglielmo). After spending his early years moving throughout Monaco, France, Belgium, and Germany, he finally settled in Paris in 1902, adopting the pen name Guillaume Apollinaire. Apollinaire became a prominent cultural figure in Paris and was a key player in the literary and artistic avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century, particularly Cubism and Surrealism.

Apollinaire first gained literary recognition for his poetry collection Alcools (1913) but is best known for inventing calligrams, a form of visual poetry. While Apollinaire was primarily a poet, he earned his living as a journalist and art critic. In his articles and reviews he championed avant-garde art, and was friends with such artists as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.

Apollinaire fought for France in WWI and returned home in 1916 after receiving a head wound. He survived the war but died of Spanish Flu in 1918.
de Morais Andrade, Mário Raul (1893–1945)
Authors: Wells Sarah Ann
Published: September 2018

Often called the pope of Brazilian Modernism, Mário de Andrade spearheaded several different phases of the movement, and is credited with introducing the term modernismo in Brazil. From pioneering the experimental first wave of Brazilian Modernism of 1922–26 to sombre reflections on national identity in the mid-1930s–1940s and moving among poetry, short fiction, essays, musicology, travel writing, and the novel Macunaíma (1928), his output is extraordinary in both its volume and its influence. Despite his shifting registers and genres, the major preoccupations of his works remain constant throughout his lengthy career: Brazilian national identity and fraught encounters between different cultures, ethnicities, and worldviews; linguistic experimentation, especially the relationship between writing and orality; and music.
Huxley, Aldous (1894–1963)
Authors: Poller Jake
Published: September 2018

Aldous Huxley is an English writer who is best known for his dystopian novel Brave New World (1932) and his disquisition on psychedelic substances, The Doors of Perception (1954). In the inter-war years, Huxley commanded a formidable reputation, and his work was considered alongside the leading modernists. He was impressively prolific and wrote in a variety of genres, producing poetry, short stories, essays, novels, plays, biography, and travel writing. His work appeared in many of the modernist Little Magazines, such as Coterie, The Egoist and Wheels. Huxley was a zealous individualist: while he socialized with Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, and Clive Bell (among others), he was never part of the Bloomsbury Group; likewise, though a regular guest at Garsington Manor, the home of society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell, he was not regarded as a member of her pacifist coterie that included Lytton Strachey and Bertrand Russell. After moving to America, Huxley became increasingly concerned with mysticism, and his reputation declined; however, the work he produced during this period was championed by key figures in the New Age and counter-culture movements, and he played a vital part in popularizing Eastern religions in the West, such as Buddhism, Tantra, and Advaita Vedanta.
Mansfield, Katherine (1888–1923)
Authors: Welch Bronwen
Published: September 2018

Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp was born in Wellington, New Zealand on October 14, 1888. Yet this bare factual statement in no way indicates Mansfield’s importance to the modernist movement, nor how she transformed the English short story. Mansfield’s writing utilizes key themes and dichotomies such as loneliness versus society; woman versus man; nature versus culture. Moreover, her style is characterized by its neutral (as opposed to emotional) tone, and her use of Symbolism to depict personal alienation.

Growing up in an arguably patriarchal, colonialist family, Mansfield adopted her middle name as a pseudonym when she was 19, perhaps to provide herself with a certain psychological distance from her upbringing. Indeed, much of her writing characterizes the tension between her unconventionality and her family’s solid affluence and high social standing. Her father, Harold Beauchamp, a successful banker, a vigorous and energetic man, longed for a son, but, to his disappointment, his first four children were female: Charlotte, Vera, Katherine and Jeanne (another sister, Gwendoline, died at four months). The longed-for son, Leslie Heron, did not arrive until 1894 (tragically Leslie was killed in 1915, fighting in France during World War I).
Woolf, Leonard (1880–1969)
Authors: Randall Bryony
Published: September 2018

Leonard Woolf was an essayist, author, political activist, and publisher. He joined the civil service in 1904 and spent seven years in Ceylon, which experience deeply influenced not only his political views but also his fictional writing. With his wife, the novelist Virginia Woolf, he ran the Hogarth Press, a vanguard publishing house of the period. The press’s first publication, entitled Two Stories, comprised his ‘Three Jews’ and Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Mark on the Wall’. He was a committed socialist and member of the Fabian Society and Labour Party; he served as honorary secretary for the Labour Party’s advisory committees on international and imperial affairs and stood (unsuccessfully) as a member of parliament for the Combined Universities in 1922. An expert on international affairs, he wrote numerous volumes of political analysis. He was a founding member of the League of Nations Society; the two reports included in his book International Government were key documents in the formation of the League itself. He was also joint or literary editor of a number of political periodicals, including the International Review, The Political Quarterly, and the Nation (later The New Statesman). He wrote five volumes of autobiography, the last published in the year of his death.
Functionalism
Authors: Parsons Glenn
Published: September 2018

Functionalism, a central idea in modernist design, rejects ornamentation unrelated to an item’s function, resulting in design that emphasizes a utilitarian purpose. The style was summed up in architect Louis Sullivan’s (1856–1924) popular slogan ‘form [ever] follows function’. Unlike modernist innovations across the arts, functionalist design sought to simplify, rather than complicate, traditional forms. It drew inspiration from various sources: the beauty of animal forms perfectly adapted to perform specific biological functions, or the aesthetic merit of industrial machinery, which was celebrated by modernist figures such as Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, 1887–1965).
Epiphany
Authors: Hu Jane
Published: September 2018

The standard Oxford English Dictionary definition of ‘epiphany’ refers to ‘an appearance or manifestation, especially of a deity’ — and in particular the divine ‘manifestation of Christ to the gentiles in the persons of the Magi’. James Joyce (1882–1941), however, popularized the term to describe not just religious manifestations, but secular, everyday and even banal revelations.
First Statement
Authors: Jensen Graham H.
Published: September 2018

Based out of Montreal, First Statement was a modernist ‘little magazine’ published between August 1942 and July 1945 for a total of thirty-three issues. John Sutherland, who was the magazine’s managing editor, founded it with the support of his sister Betty, Audrey Aikman (his future wife), R. G. Simpson, Keith MacLellan and Mary Margaret Miller.
Jacob, Max (1876–1944)
Authors: Dickow Alexander
Published: September 2018

The poet and painter Max Jacob was a major figure in the Parisian artistic movements of the early twentieth century. With his friends Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) and Pierre Reverdy (1889–1960), Jacob produced some of the Esprit Nouveau’s most radical works.
Maurras, Charles (1868–1952)
Authors: Chappel James
Published: September 2018

Charles Maurras was a controversial French poet and political theorist. Born in southern France to a royalist mother, Maurras became notorious during the Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906), when his incendiary journalism propelled him to the front ranks of French Monarchism.
Moore, Marianne (1887–1972)
Authors: Hickman Miranda
Published: September 2018

Marianne Moore (1887–1972), born in Kirkwood, Missouri, USA, was a major American modernist poet and editor of The Dial from 1925–29. Among other modernist poets with whom Moore sustained significant connections were T. S. Eliot, H. D., Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens. Moore attended Bryn Mawr College for women in Pennsylvania between 1905 and 1909; thereafter she moved to New York with her mother, Mary Warner Moore, where they would reside together until Mary Warner Moore died in 1947 and where Moore would remain until the end of her life. Moore’s major publications include Selected Poems (1935), with an introduction by T. S. Eliot; Collected Poems (1951), for which Moore received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; and Complete Poems (1967), which was re-edited and reissued in 1981. Her extensive body of criticism is available in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore. Moore’s archive, including her library and personal effects, is housed at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia; additional papers are located at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Linda Leavell’s biography of Moore, Holding on Upside Down, appeared in 2013.
Virago Press
Authors: Lipton Shawna
Published: September 2018

Virago Press is a British publishing company founded in 1973 by Carmen Callil primarily to endorse women’s writing and increase awareness of women’s literary history. Inspired by the women’s movement, the name ‘Virago’ and the bitten apple logo suggest the power of courageous, outspoken females, as well as the power of subversive knowledge. Elaine Showalter’s (1941–) A Literature of their Own (1977) influenced the Virago Modern Classics series, which reissues books by overlooked or underappreciated writers.
Eichenbaum, Boris (1886–1959)
Authors: Norris Christopher
Published: September 2018

Boris Mikhailovich Eichenbaum (Борис Михайлович Эйхенбаум) was a leading figure in the Russian formalist school of literary scholars, critics and theorists. An early member of OPOYAZ (Общество изучения Поэтического Языка, Society for the Study of Poetic Language) and a prominent member of the school, Eichenbaum propounded the latter’s central claims during its period of highest visibility in the first half of the 1920s and also defended it against attack from revolutionary thinkers (like Leon Trotsky) who rejected Formalism for its supposed lack of social-historical engagement.
Frobenius, Leo (1873–1938)
Authors: Elder Bruce
Published: September 2018

Leo Viktor Frobenius, a German ethnologist and philosopher of culture with a particular interest in African cultures, was a central figure in the German discipline of Kulturmorphologie.
Garvey, Marcus (1887 – 1940)
Authors: Pickens Mark
Published: September 2018

Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr, was a Jamaican political leader and a prominent figure in promoting Pan-Africanism. His work as a public speaker, publisher and entrepreneur earned him a central role in the back-to-Africa movement of the 1920s.
Jaspers, Karl (1883−1969)
Authors: Taylor Simon
Published: September 2018

Karl Jaspers was a German psychiatrist and existential philosopher. After graduating from medical school in 1908, Jaspers took up a research position in a psychiatric clinic in Heidelberg but soon became dissatisfied with both the theory and practice of contemporary psychiatry. The result was the landmark two-volume General Psychopathology (1913), which attempted to provide psychiatry with a systematic epistemological foundation.
Sandler, Irving (1925– )
Authors: Pancza Graham Arleen
Published: September 2018

Irving Harry Sandler, an American art historian, critic and administrator, was born in New York City and brought up and educated in Philadelphia. He received his M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1950 and completed his Ph.D. at New York University in 1976. In the intervening years, Sandler managed the Tanager Gallery, served as the director of The Club (1957–1962), and wrote criticism for ARTnews (1956–1962). After completing his doctorate, he taught at the State University of New York at Purchase (1972–1997), where he curated a number of exhibitions and conducted oral history interviews with contemporary artists.
Walden, Herwarth (1878–1941)
Authors: Anger Jenny
Published: September 2018

Herwarth Walden was the force behind Der Sturm, an avant-garde journal, gallery, performance venue, bookstore and theater school in Berlin (1910–1932). Walden’s first wife, the poet Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945), whose works he set to music, bestowed the utopian name on him. Walden founded the journal Der Sturm in 1910. His contacts through Lasker-Schüler, his piano teacher Conrad Ansorge (1862–1930), and the Viennese writer Karl Kraus (1874–1936) and architect Adolf Loos (1870–1933) ensured the journal’s success.
Dalí i Domènech, Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto (1904–1989)
Authors: Lantz Andy
Published: September 2018

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech was a Spanish artist whose works and personal life were marked by grandiose eccentricity. Although best known for his paintings, Dalí also ventured into other areas of artistic expression, including cinema.