bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950)
Authors: Switzky Lawrence
Published: September 2018

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, music and drama critic, and political theorist who pioneered the play of ideas as a dramatic genre, was instrumental in the formation of the Labour Party in England, and remains the only person to have won both the Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Academy Award (1938, Best Adapted Screenplay, Pygmalion). The intellectual and social seriousness of his ideas, his effusive, literary dialogue, and his invention of new genres such as the discussion play were pivotal contributions to the modernization of drama.

Born into a Protestant family in Dublin, Shaw moved to London in 1876 and began ghost-writing a music column for The Hornet while also pursuing an unpromising career as a novelist and becoming involved with the Fabian Society, a British socialist organization that promoted a gradualist rather than revolutionary approach to social reform. In The Quintessence of Ibsenism, initially delivered to the Fabians as a lecture in 1891, Shaw articulated his nascent dramaturgical principles. He argued that Ibsen’s most important contribution to the development of modern drama was replacing the violent catastrophes of melodrama with discussion scenes in which characters sat down and talked about intractable social problems. Shaw’s views about modern drama were put into practice in his first three plays: Widowers’ Houses (1892), about slum landlordism, The Philanderer (1893), about divorce, and Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893), about prostitution.
Teatro del pueblo
Authors: White-Nockleby Anna
Published: September 2018

Teatro del Pueblo (The People’s Theater) was the first ‘independent’ theater in Argentina and launched the teatro independiente movement in Buenos Aires. Founded on November 30, 1930, by the writer Leónidas Barletta (1902–1975), Teatro del Pueblo rejected both popular and commercial precedents in its promotion of a modern but socially conscious theater available to all. Barletta pushed against popular genres such as the sainete one-act plays, which he believed, as he asserted in 1938, "rendered a people without moral values, a youth both crude and without ideals" (cited in Verzero 2). Instead, taking cues from French dramaturge Romain Rolland’s essay The People's Theater, he sought a movement that would restore theater’s function as socially productive art. To this end, Barletta supported original playwriting that resisted established models while broadening the cultural offering to include conferences, concerts, and lectures open to the public. Two magazines, Metrópolis (‘Of those that write to say something’) and Conducta (‘In the service of the People’), also provided a forum for discourse on the theater.
Aharonián, Coriún (1940--)
Authors: Herrera Eduardo
Published: September 2018

Coriún Aharonián was born in Montevideo, Uruguay on August 4, 1940. His parents, Nubar Aharonián and Victoria Kharputlián, arrived in Uruguay in 1927 and 1928, part of the massive exodus of Armenians due to the genocide at the hands of the Turkish government at the beginning of the twentieth century. Aharonián’s early interest in music was supported by his family, and as a five-year old he began studying piano with Adela Herrera-Lerena, which lasted until 1959. From 1955–1957 and 1966–1969, he studied with the Uruguayan composer Héctor Tosar. Between 1964 and 1966 he worked on his musicological formation with Lauro Ayestarán. Aharonián received a fellowship to study at the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires in 1969–1970, but before the end of 1969 he postponed the fellowship and traveled to Europe to further his studies. With funding from the French government, he studied at the conservatory of Paris and at the Groupe de Recherche Musicale (GRM) between 1969 and 1970. With the help of another scholarship, this time from the Italian government, he studied in Venice with Luigi Nono (1924-1990). Aharonián attended the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt in 1970 and 1974. He received lessons from several composers such as Gerardo Gandini (1936-2013), Vinko Globokar (1934–), György Ligeti (1923-2005), Gordon Mumma (1935–), Folke Rabe (1935–), Christian Wolff (1934–) and Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001). With regard to his composition teachers, the strongest influences came from Héctor Tosar and Luigi Nono.
Bértola, Eduardo (1939--1996)
Authors: Juarez Camila
Published: September 2018

Eduardo Bértola was born in Coronel Moldes, Córdoba, Argentina, 14 July 1939, and died in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, on 20 February 1996. Bértola was part of a generation of Latin American musicians from the 1960s and 1970s that included Joaquín Orellana from Guatemala, Coriún Aharonián from Uruguay, as well as Graciela Paraskevaídis, Alcides Lanza, Gerardo Gandini, Mariano Etkin and Oscar Bazán from Argentina. Bértola is recognized in the field of electroacoustic composition and, as Aharonián and Paraskevaídis have pointed out, his work is characterized by timbral exploration, distinctive textures, use of silence and repetition, austerity of materials, and a structure based on repetitive units without development.
Revueltas Sánchez, Silvestre (1899–1940)
Authors: Avila Jacqueline
Published: September 2018

Silvestre Revueltas was a Mexican modernist composer and violinist. Known mainly for his references to modern Mexican culture, Revueltas is regarded as an essential figure during the Mexican modernist and nationalist movement in music. He composed chamber works, vocal pieces, and music for larger symphonic orchestras, and was also one of the most successful film composers in the Mexican film industry during the 1930s. Suffering from severe alcoholism and health problems, Revueltas died of pneumonia in December 1940.
Sharp, Cecil James (1859--1924)
Authors: Walkowitz Daniel J.
Published: September 2018

In the short span of about fifteen years in the early twentieth century, Cecil James Sharp ignited a folk revival in country song and dance in both England and the United States that would shape the revivalist song and dance movements into the twenty-first century. The most renowned and prolific folk song and dance collector of his day, Sharp also rediscovered, transcribed and notated the several hundred dances of The English Dancing Master published by John Playford starting in 1651, a corpus that became the core curriculum of a transatlantic revival in English Country Dance. Ironically, Sharp mobilized anti-modern folk traditions for a modernist project. Imagining the ‘folk’—simple rural villagers—as carriers of a pristine, idyllic culture, he celebrated English folk song and dance as ‘authentic’ Englishness, as a way of Anglicizing migrants and immigrants to urban life. Occasionally omitting behaviour (e.g., kissing) or language that challenged his sense of propriety, he took the dances and songs of the ‘peasantry’ and reproduced them as a modern middle-class alternative to the popular culture he associated with the music hall.
Barnes, Djuna (1892–1982)
Authors: Roos Bonnie
Published: September 2018

Djuna Barnes (1892–1982) was a significant U.S. American literary figure of Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, but became a recluse of New York’s Patchin Place in the 1940s, ending her life in obscure poverty. She is best known for her experimental novel Nightwood, one of the most influential works of modernist fiction, and for her caustic wit. Barnes worked as a poet, journalist, illustrator, playwright, reviewer, and novelist. Her most recognized writings include The Book of Repulsive Women (produced 1915), Ryder (1928), Ladies Almanack (1928), Nightwood (1936), The Antiphon (1958), and Creatures in an Alphabet (1982).

Barnes’s first novel, Ryder (1928), details 50 years of the fictional Ryder family; the same year, Ladies Almanack, understood as a roman à clef novel parodying participants of Natalie Barney’s salon, was privately published. Many of the qualities of satire, dark humor, and surrealism for which Barnes is known are visible in Ryder and Ladies Almanack. But it is Nightwood, Barnes's third novel, that critics see as her most successful work.
Bloomsday
Authors: Huculak J. Matthew
Published: September 2018

Bloomsday, June 16th, is an annual global literary holiday honoring the characters of James Joyce’s Ulysses; the celebrations are marked by readings, re-enactments, pub-crawls, and other activities relating to passages from the novel. The day takes its name from the protagonist of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, whose odyssey through Dublin on Thursday, June 16, 1904, provides the narrative thrust of the story. Joyce chose the date for the diurnal narrative since it marks his first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle.
Fascist Modernism
Authors: Maertz Gregory
Published: September 2018

Fascist modernism is an artistic and literary movement emphasizing extreme nationalism, romantic anti-capitalism, and cultural renewal most closely associated with Fascist Italy, Vichy France, and National Socialist Germany (see Nazi modernism) but also describing the fusion of innovative literary technique and reactionary politics found in the writings of leading American, English, and Irish modernist authors such as T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and W. B. Yeats.
Ford, Ford Madox (1873-1939)
Authors: Frayn Andrew
Published: September 2018

Ford Madox Ford was a British author of German ancestry (he was born Ford Hermann Hueffer), a novelist, poet, editor, critic, biographer, and memoirist. Under his editorship (1908/9) the English Review journal was an influential organ of early modernism, although a commercial failure. He is perhaps best known for The Good Soldier (1915), a classic tale of unreliable narration and psychological intrigue. Ford served in the Great War, and his masterful Parade’s End tetralogy (1924–8) draws on this experience as he develops the modernist techniques and metaphors used in The Good Soldier to rethink the conflict. Ford continued to write novels, literary criticism and history, travel literature, and memoirs until the end of his life. He died in northern France in 1939.
McLuhan, Marshall (1911–1980)
Authors: Hammond Adam
Published: September 2018

Born Herbert Marshall McLuhan in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Marshall McLuhan was a literary critic, communications theorist, public intellectual, and the father of modern media studies. McLuhan rose to international fame as a ‘media guru’ in the 1960s when works like The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Understanding Media (1964), and The Medium is the Massage (1967) became best sellers. His dictum, ‘the medium is the message’ — which packages McLuhan’s notion that humans and human society are more profoundly affected by the formal properties of the media through which they communicate than by the specific content transmitted — became widely known, if not widely understood, during this period. Though his public and academic influence waned in the last decade of his life, interest in McLuhan’s ideas was revived with the expansion and popularization of the internet. Among the many thinkers he has influenced are Neil Postman, Jean Beaudrillard, and Friedrich Kittler.
Sitwell, Edith (1887–1964)
Authors: Barber Claire
Published: September 2018

Dame Edith Sitwell was an experimental poet known for her eccentric behavior and aesthetics. A skillfully controlled reading voice, along with dramatic clothes and jewelry, led to her widespread recognition as an exceptional performer. Though she has received little attention within modernist studies, she significantly influenced the development of twentieth-century art with literary productions like Façade (1922) and her patronage of other artists, including Dylan Thomas. Her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell were two of her closest companions and collaborators. With them, she endeavored to build an avant-garde artistic society rivaling the Bloomsbury Group.

Born into the British aristocracy, Sitwell had a strained relationship with her parents, Sir George and Lady Ida Sitwell, daughter of the Earl of Londesborough. A tall girl with an aquiline nose and hooded eyes, Sitwell did not conform to their idea of beauty, so her parents forced her to wear metal appliances to correct her spine and nose—an experience described in her autobiography, Taken Care Of (1965). Lady Sitwell’s trial for fraud exacerbated this dysfunctional family dynamic during the same year in which Edith published her first literary work, The Mother and Other Poems (1915). However, she had already moved to London in 1914 with former governess Helen Rootham, where she established a literary salon in austere rooms at Pembridge Mansions.
Primitivism
Authors: Basu Priyanka
Published: September 2018

Primitivism in modern art designates a range of practices and accompanying modes of thought that span the period from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and cut across manifold artistic styles and groups. This entry presents instances of Primitivism from this period that are representative of its features. Modern artistic Primitivism refers, above all, to the ways in which Western artists valorized and drew upon aspects of so-called ‘primitive’ art and cultures in their works, ideas and lifestyles. They employed selective formal and thematic elements that they believed were characteristic of the arts and cultures of not only small-scale, native, non-Western peoples, but also of larger-scale, more highly organized non-Western societies, Western pre-Renaissance and non-classical styles and European vernacular means of expression. Even more frequently, these artists freely intermixed such elements and invented others that suited their conceptions of the ‘primitive’, generating hybrid forms and cultural features.
Contemporary Poetry and Prose
Authors: Davis Thomas S.
Published: September 2018

Contemporary Poetry and Prose was an avant-garde magazine edited by Roger Roughton that ran for ten issues between the spring of 1936 and the autumn of 1937.
Grimké, Angelina Weld (1880–1958)
Authors: Bernstein Robin
Published: September 2018

African American poet, fiction writer, and playwright Angelina Weld Grimké was born in Boston in 1880, the daughter of Sarah Stanley, who was White, and Archibald H. Grimké, who was African American and vice-president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She was named for her great-aunt, the White abolitionist Angelina Grimké Weld (1805–1879), who died shortly before the playwright was born. As a schoolgirl, Grimké began publishing fiction and poetry. She was politically engaged, and at the age of nineteen she collected signatures for a petition against lynching.
Gunn, Neil M. (1891–1973)
Authors: McCulloch Margery Palmer
Published: September 2018

Neil M. Gunn was one of the writers who responded to Hugh MacDiarmid’s (1892–1978) appeal for supporters in his ambitious post-1918 aim to revitalize Scottish literature. Gunn was a Highlander from the village of Dunbeath on the Caithness coast of north-east Scotland and as such was an important recruit for the Lowlander MacDiarmid, who described his first novel The Grey Coast (1926) as ‘something new, and big, in Scottish literature’ (Grieve 269).
Klossowski, Pierre (1905–2001)
Authors: Chestopalova Natalja
Published: September 2018

French philosopher, writer, artist and translator Pierre Klossowski was born in Paris and raised in Switzerland, Germany and France. His education was influenced by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) and André Gide (1869–1951). A friend of Georges Bataille (1897–1962), Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) and Pierre-Jean Jouve (1887–1976), Klossowski produced French translations of works by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Franz Kafka (1883–1924), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) from German, and of the works of Suetonius, Virgil, Augustine and Tertullian from Latin.
Laforgue, Jules (1860–1887)
Authors: Reverseau Anne
Published: September 2018

Jules Laforgue is one of the French ‘poètes maudits’ of the late nineteenth century. Maintaining a certain distance from literary movements, he developed a unique style, mixing the expression of pain with humor and sometimes satire. Often compared to Tristan Corbière (1845–1875), he is considered a symbolist for his Mysticism and the use of free verse, especially in his Derniers vers (1890). He is also considered to be a precursor of the Fantaisistes for the oral character of his poetry.
Leiris, Michel (1901–1990)
Authors: Guédon Cécile
Published: September 2018

Eluding easy categorization, French poet, essayist and autobiographer Julien Michel Leiris was affiliated with literary Surrealism, Existentialism and ethnography. Involved with the surrealist movement through his friendships with André Masson (1896–1987), Max Jacob (1876–1944) and Georges Bataille (1897–1962), Leiris published texts of surrealist inspiration such as Simulacre (1925), which featured Masson’s lithographs; Le Point cardinal (1927), ‘a prose narrative of erotic transcendence’ (Hand 29); and Aurora (1946), his only novel, which was written two decades earlier.
Maghut, Muhammad (1934–2006)
Authors: Ziter Edward
Published: September 2018

Muhammad Maghut, a Syrian poet born in Salamiya, is widely credited with introducing free-verse into Arabic poetry. He published his first collection, Huzn fi daw’ al-qamar (Sorrow in Moonlight), in 1959, which was followed by several other collections, most famously Al-farah laysa mihnati (Happiness Is not my Profession) in 1970.
St. Vincent Millay, Edna (1892–1950)
Authors: Black Cheryl
Published: September 2018

Edna St. Vincent Millay was a poet, playwright and free-spirited bohéme who epitomized the aesthetically and sexually adventurous ‘new woman’ of the early twentieth century. Born in Rockland, Maine, and raised by an unconventional mother who encouraged her intellectual and artistic pursuits, Millay garnered national attention at the age of nineteen with her lyric poem Renascence (1912). Millay’s innovative poetry, for which she received a Pulitzer Prize in 1923, integrated conventional forms with unconventional content that celebrated sexual liberation and female autonomy.
Voorslag
Authors: Voss Tony
Published: September 2018

Voorslag (Whiplash) was a literary journal published in South Africa from 1926 to 1927. Sold as ‘A Magazine of South African Life and Art’, it appeared monthly until February 1927, then bi-monthly for one issue and finally finished its run as a quarterly: one in a long succession of little magazines from the Pringle-Fairbairn South African Journal (1824), which sank after two issues after having been torpedoed by the threat of censorship, to Stephen Black’s (1880–1931) Sjambok, which was launched in 1929 only to be shipwrecked by a libel action in 1931, and beyond.
Collège de Sociologie
Authors: Sheehan Paul
Published: September 2018

A discussion group of French intellectuals established in Paris in March 1937, the Collège de Sociologie lasted until late 1939.
Evolutionism
Authors: La Shot Derek
Published: September 2018

Evolutionism refers to the notion that basic life forms increase in complexity over time due to environmental adaptation. While commonly attributed to Charles Darwin (1809–1882), the notion that life forms vary over time had long been posited before his Origin of the Species (1859). Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s (1744–1829) organic evolution, for instance, had posited that life forms could directly pass on traits to their progeny after environmental exposure. Though discredited today, Lamarck’s claim held widespread currency even after Mendelian genetics falsified it.
Niebuhr, Reinhold (1892–1971)
Authors: Peterson Paul Silas
Published: September 2018

Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr was an influential pastor and theologian in America. His thought initially centered on liberal pacifism, but it later turned to the program of the social gospel and, finally, to ‘Christian Realism’. Niebuhr’s father was a German immigrant Protestant pastor; his mother also came from an immigrant pastor’s family. Niebuhr completed his theological education at Eden Theological Seminary (Webster Groves, Missouri) and Yale Divinity School, and he was ordained in 1913.
November Revolution (German History)
Authors: Kotte Claudia
Published: September 2018

Over the course of November 1918, Germany’s political system changed from a constitutional monarchy to a parliamentary republic. The November Revolution was a consequence of the military defeat of the German Empire in World War I and was triggered by the naval mutiny carried out on October 29, 1918. Soldiers and workers throughout the Empire joined the movement, which turned into an open revolution and was headed by the two social democratic parties, the Majority Social Democrats Party (Mehrheitssozialdemokratische Partei) or MSPD (later the Social Democratic Party of Germany [Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands] or SPD) and the more socialist-leaning Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) or USPD.
Sorel, Georges (1847–1922)
Authors: Perlea Georgiana
Published: September 2018

Georges Sorel was a French social thinker and political theorist. An engineer of modest bourgeois extraction, he was a state employee for twenty-five years. He theorized anarcho-syndicalism: an anti-state, non-party workers’ movement predicated on the threat of general strike (le grand soir, lit. the big night) and nourished by fond memories of the Paris Commune (1871).
Freud, Lucian (1922–2011)
Authors: Arya Rina
Published: September 2018

Lucian Freud was a British painter and draughtsman whose work is characterized by his intense figure studies and muted palette. Born in Berlin on 8 December 1922, Freud was the grandson of Sigmund Freud. His family moved to England in 1933, where he would remain for the rest of his life. In 1939 Freud acquired British citizenship; during the same year, he studied at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, under Welsh-born painter Cedric Morris. Freud’s work is characterized by a realism of the flesh, as seen in his portraits and nudes, and by dramatic charge. From the late 1950s, Freud’s work became freer in his handling of paint, which is conveyed by the exploration of the spatial contours of faces and bodies. His figures are situated in stark interiors which add to the pervasive feeling of alienation. Freud was part of the post-war generation of British realist painters who were preoccupied with the human figure. He is loosely associated with Neo-Romanticism and is part of the "School of London" with other artists including Francis Bacon, Michael Andrews and Leon Kossoff; however this grouping was primarily based on social affiliations rather than on shared artistic preoccupations, with the exception of their common interest in the human form.
Matisse, Henri (1869–1954)
Authors: Kolokytha Chara
Published: September 2018

Henri Matisse is a key figure in French modernism and is considered to be the most influential colourist of 20th-century art. A French painter, sculptor, and printmaker, Matisse studied painting in Paris at the École des Beaux Arts under Gustave Moreau, the École des Arts Décoratifs, and the Académie Julian under W.A. Bouguereau. Matisse’s early paintings demonstrate a dark, somber, and dull palette and a naturalist approach to his selected themes (La liseuse, 1894). This progressively gave way to more vivid pure colors (Still Life with Oranges, 1899; Académie bleue, 1899–1900) and impressionist execution (Study of a Nude, 1899). In 1903, Matisse began to use intense pure colors, marking a break with both naturalist and impressionist traditions (Portrait d’André Derain, 1905). He inaugurated a new style that contemporary critics named Fauvism (Le Bonheur de vivre, 1905–1906). From the early 1920s, Matisse enjoyed a worldwide reputation, being famous both for his masterfully colored compositions and for the joyful atmosphere of his works, which became the hallmark of his overall artistic production. Works by Matisse can be found in most museums of modern art around the world in addition to primary displays at the Museum Matisse in Nice and in his birthplace, Le Cateau Cambrésis.
Neo-Impressionism
Authors: Somers Lynn M.
Published: September 2018

Neo-Impressionism (1886–1906) comprised a group of avant-garde painters in France who explored a systematic approach to painting that revived Classical ideals while critiquing Impressionism’s prevailing aesthetic of spontaneity and improvisation. Led by the young, Parisian-born Georges Seurat, a rebellious École des Beaux-Arts-trained painter and anarchist, the Neo-Impressionists first gained attention at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1886. There, Seurat and his student Paul Signac, accompanied by the older Camille Pissarro, and his son Lucien, staged their bold new work. Its centerpiece was Seurat’s monumental Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1886), a visual manifesto to Neo-Impressionist precepts.

In his review, art critic and activist Félix Fénéon coined the label néo-impressionisme to describe compositions that forcefully advanced Impressionism’s vibrant coloristic experiments. He detailed Seurat’s method of juxtaposing small, regularized touches of adjacent and complementary colors as ‘optical painting." Termed "divisionism," unblended pigments would theoretically "recombine on the retina" of the observer, resulting in a brilliant synthesis of hue and light on the painted surface. The methodical application of dots was termed "pointillism."
Rendón, Manuel (1894–1980)
Authors: Tornatore-Loong Maria C
Published: September 2018

The French-born Ecuadorian painter Manuel Rendón Seminario (also known as Manuel Rendón) is credited for introducing Geometric Abstraction to Ecuador together with compatriot Areceli Gilbert de Blomberg. As a member of the Post-Cubist L’École de Paris in the 1920s, Rendón’s early oeuvre synthesized avant-garde styles, notably Cubo-Futurism, Purism, and Surrealism, reminiscent of the techniques of modern masters such as Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Amédée Ozenfant, and Giorgio de Chirico, artists whom he greatly admired. In 1911, Rendón exhibited at the Café de la Rotonde (whose curator was Henri Matisse), followed by the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1916, the Salon des Indépendants, Société du Salon d’Automne, Salon des Tuileries, and the Salon des Surindépendants. He also exhibited with the vanguard "La Horde de Montparnasse" and joined "Clarté," the pro-Communist youth group commanded by the French novelist Henri Barbusse. Rendón’s indigenist works of the 1930s and 1940s, however, were painted in a Neo-realist figurative mode, depicting the exotic Ecuadorian landscape and the plight of the native population, while his mature practice of the 1950s to 1970s was characterized by geometric abstraction and pure linearity, culminating in kaleidoscopic color and rhythmical kinetic qualities, as in the manner of the Divisionists.
Frankfurt School
Authors: Pecora Vincent P.
Published: September 2018

The Frankfurt School (Institute für Sozialforschung) was founded in 1923 by Felix Weil and fellow students Max Horkheimer and Friedrich Pollack, and was originally endowed by Weil’s father. Its early members included Leo Lowenthal, Henryk Grossman, Julian Gumperz, Franz Borkenau, Karl August Wittfogel, and Carl Grünberg, its first director. These were the sons of a largely assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie in Frankfurt who, following the example of the highly energized and diverse student movements after Germany’s loss in World War I and the subsequent failure of socialist revolution there, desired avenues for transformative research and discussion outside the boundaries of traditional universities.
Pratt, E. J. (1882–1964)
Authors: Scott Conrad
Published: September 2018

Edwin John Dove Pratt was a Canadian poet and academic whose often spare language displays vivid imagery while still employing rhyme, metrics, and blank verse. As a chronicler of the maritime crux of living between sea and land, in his early work Pratt captured the liminality between anthropological and natural concerns in Newfoundland community and livelihood. At the same time, he was instrumental in upholding and expanding the epic and narrative elements of the long poem form—in his larger works moving towards grand themes such as nationhood. He taught in the Department of English at Victoria College (University of Toronto) until his retirement in 1953 when he became Professor Emeritus. Pratt was a Literary Adviser to the Editorial Board of Acta Victoriana as well as a founder and the first editor of Canadian Poetry Magazine (1936–1942), and received many honours from Canadian literary and educational institutions in his career.
Breathless (1960)
Authors: Siddiqui Gohar
Published: September 2018

Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless captures French New Wave’s rejection of traditional cinematic form, and its style has influenced alternative, political, and documentary filmmakers.
Eisenstein, Sergei Mikhailovich (1898–1948)
Authors: Eubanks Ivan
Published: September 2018

Sergei Eisenstein was an early Soviet film director and theorist who produced widely acknowledged masterpieces of both silent and sound cinema, such as Strike (1924), Battleship Potemkin (1925), October (1927), Alexander Nevsky (1938) Ivan the Terrible I (1944), and Ivan the Terrible II (1958). He is widely known for devising influential theories on montage as the basis for cinematic art.

Although acclaimed for his cinematic masterpieces and film theory, Sergei Eisenstein began his career in theater. He joined the Red Army in 1918 after studying civil engineering, and he was assigned to a theatrical troupe where he worked as set designer. After being demobilized in 1920, Eisenstein found employment at the Proletkult Theater in Moscow, where he worked under the tutelage of Vsevolod Meyerhold, who would have a lasting influence on him. After spending approximately five years in theater, Eisenstein wrote "Montage of Attractions" (1923), outlining the theory that he had conceived while directing his first play for stage, Alexander Ostrovsky’s Enough Stupidity in Any Wise Man (1868). Defining "attractions" as calculated emotional shocks delivered by a play, Eisenstein claimed that an accumulative series of affects could guide audience members to adopt a given ideology. Thus, he believed, a good script consisted of a plan for engendering attractions in a compelling sequence. He implicitly de-emphasized character-driven plots and suggested that attractions prove most potent, not when arising from the context of a story, but rather when originating with extra-textual associations triggered by action. By 1924, however, he deemed action less effective at evoking such extra-textual associations than images, the fundamental vessels of meaning in cinema, and he therefore resolved that film provides the more powerful means of generating attractions. He thus adapted his theory to cinema, which became the basis of his work in that medium.
Saura, Carlos (1932–)
Authors: Hortelano Lorenzo J. Torres
Published: September 2018

Carlos Saura, screenwriter and film director, has often been praised as representing the summit of the Spanish post-war filmic universe. His film style throughout his career resembles an elliptical and poetic language, used not just for political reasons, but also out of his modernist willingness to pursue aesthetic innovation.
UPA (United Productions of America)
Authors: Leskosky Richard J.
Published: September 2018

Hollywood cartoon studio UPA (United Productions of America) was founded in 1943 by former Disney animators Steven Bosustow, Zachary Schwartz, and David Hilberman. It profoundly influenced animation art and practice around the world with its modern design and adult themes. UPA created highly praised theatrical cartoon shorts, distributed by Columbia Pictures, from 1948 until 1959. During this time it also produced television commercials, the ground-breaking animated television series The Boing-Boing Show (1956–1957), and the feature-length cartoon, 1001 Arabian Nights (1959). Although UPA continued as a business entity into the 21st century, its aesthetic significance and influence effectively ended with its theatrical shorts.

UPA animators, most of them graduates of college art programs, had become frustrated with the stratified studio production system pioneered by Walt Disney and with Disney’s relatively realistic character animation, both of which had been widely imitated. Language of Vision (1944) by Gyorgy Kepes, head of the Light and Color curriculum at Chicago’s New Bauhaus, significantly influenced UPA animators with its notions of the educational function of visual art and its analysis of design components.
Rolland, Romain (1866–1944)
Authors: Coustille-Cossou Charles
Published: September 2018

Writer, professor, musicologist, biographer, essayist, novelist, playwright, great letter writer and diarist, mystic in search of a pacified world and of a heroic heart, Romain Rolland profoundly marked the first half of the twentieth century. While he initially wrote for the theatre, his first success would come from the ten-volume novel Jean-Christophe, published between 1904 and 1912. Through the life of a young and enthusiastic German musician with a French first name, he depicted, in great detail, two rival societies under the threat of war. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915.

A talented piano player in his youth, Romain Rolland entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1886, defended a dissertation on the Origins of Modern Lyrical Drama [Les origines du théâtrelyrique moderne], and went on to teach art history and musicology at the Sorbonne. In Rome, he met Malwida von Meyensburg (a former friend of Nietzsche and Wagner) who accelerated his debut in literature. While he initially wrote for the theatre, his first success would come from the ten-volume novel Jean-Christophe, published between 1904 and 1912. Through the life of a young and enthusiastic German musician with a French first name, he depicted, in great detail, two rival societies under the threat of war.
Beatty, Talley (1919–1995)
Authors: Dixon Melanye
Published: September 2018

Talley Beatty, whose career began in the mid-1930s and extended six decades, was a leading modern dance artist. He was a prolific choreographer, exquisite dancer, and exacting teacher. As a performer, he played a significant role in the establishment of Katherine Dunham’s company, and as a choreographer he played a crucial role in the establishment of Alvin Ailey’s company. Building on Dunham’s example, his works anticipated the stylistic fusion and musicality of Ailey’s repertoire. Yet, as a dance-maker, he addressed issues of social injustice and racial inequality more directly and more forcibly than did Dunham and Ailey. His works set the stage for the modernist dance lexicon that is central to the Black tradition in American concert dance, and his masterworks survive in repertoire as a cornerstone of Black dance.
Denishawn (1915–1931)
Authors: Scolieri Paul A.
Published: September 2018

Denishawn, a for-profit enterprise combining a school and dance company, was founded in Los Angeles in 1915 by the internationally acclaimed solo performer Ruth St. Denis and her husband, then up-and-coming dancer and choreographer Ted Shawn. Denishawn paved the way for modern dance in the United States by challenging American perceptions of dancing as a degenerate or immoral activity and presenting dance instead as a theatrical art. The company performed at private society events and women’s clubs, on vaudeville circuits, and eventually on legitimate concert stages, such as Carnegie Hall. In 1925–27, it became the first U.S. dance company to tour Asia, presenting dances to both colonial elites and local audiences. The Denishawn School of Dance and its Related Arts (and later satellites in New York and other major U.S. cities) trained generations of middle-class American adolescents, several of whom went on to become prominent modern dancers and choreographers, including Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman, as well as Hollywood choreographer Jack Cole. Moreover, many aspiring actresses enrolled at the Denishawn school to study the art of physical expression, several of whom later became silent film stars, including Dorothy and Lillian Gish, Margaret Loomis, and Louise Brooks.
Hula
Authors: Shaka Angeline
Published: September 2018

Hula, as the Native Hawaiian scholar Mary Kawena Pukui (1895–1986) noted, is a general name for Hawaii’s folk dances. While it is impossible to point to one origin story for hula, multiple origin stories for the dances are included in various Hawaiian myths. In addition to hula’s beginnings, these myths also explain the creation of the island chain and its indigenous inhabitants, revealing an interconnected relationship between hula, the land and Hawaii’s people. With the establishment of the tourist industry in Hawaii at the turn of the twentieth century, hula became commodified and gendered as female for vacationing tourists. New performance contexts established in the late twentieth century, however, challenged this commodification of hula, as Native Hawaiian practitioners sought to reclaim the ancient hula traditions that seemed to be erased through the ‘hula girl’s’ acculturated dance. Hula competitions and concert hula productions set alternative parameters for defining and performing traditional hula styles. Both draw on hula’s established history of incorporating hybrid musical, compositional, bodily, choreographic and narrative influences into its traditional performance. Such hybridization encapsulates hula’s various encounters with modernity and its influences, becoming a flash point for producing cosmopolitan Native identities and for capitalizing on tradition.
Sassoon, Siegfried (1886–1967)
Authors: Von Cannon Michael
Published: September 2018

Siegfried Sassoon was a poet, memoirist, novelist, and World War One soldier. His pre-war poetry, heavily influenced by Edward Marsh and the Georgian school of poets, was often criticized for derivative thought and emotional ambiguity. In 1914, Sassoon enlisted as a trooper, desiring to be one of the enlisted men. However, less than a year later, he earned his commission as a second lieutenant in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. During his convalescence from injuries incurred in the Battle of Arras (1917), Sassoon began developing objections to the war. He sent Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration to his commanding officer; it was also read in Parliament. Just as war and protest gave Sassoon’s life purpose, they also improved the satirical power and emotional unity of his poetry. He is best known, though, for his fictionalized autobiographical trilogy, (Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man [1928], Memoirs of an Infantry Officer [1930], and Sherston’s Progress [1936]).
Lifar, Serge (1905–1986)
Authors: Veroli Patrizia
Published: September 2018

A crucial figure in the rehabilitation of ballet at the Paris Opéra, Serge Lifar had a glamorous career as a dancer, choreographer, and intellectual in the 1930s and 1940s. Acclaimed for the harmonious lines of his sculptured body and charismatic stage personality, he was less gifted as a choreographer, favoring a neo-classical style and heroic ballet narratives featuring a protagonist whom he himself usually played. He also achieved considerable fame, especially in France, as a dance historian, theorist, and heir to Serge Diaghilev, in part through the numerous collections that found their way to important institutions and also because of the support of the Russian émigré community. A controversial figure owing to his relationship with German authorities during the occupation of Paris (1940–1944), Lifar was figure much loved by his dancers and idolized by the media. Despite his relentless self-promotion which made him a media star in France, his influence as a choreographer, teacher and ballet theorist has remained largely confined to his home country.
Mass Dance
Authors: Warden Claire
Published: September 2018

The early years of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of mass spectacles and events on a grand scale with thousands of participants, which frequently included non-professional performers. These spectacles often re-enacted historical events (Paterson Strike Pageant, The Storming of the Winter Palace) or celebrated technological innovations or national achievements (18BL, Olympic Youth). Performances crossed both geographical and political borders, were encouraged by parties from across the political spectrum, and took place in a range of countries including Germany, Italy, Russia and the US. The aim of these mass spectacles was to unite a crowd, which could number in the thousands, behind a particular historical, political or social position or idea. By attempting to unite a majority, these performances often ignored, isolated or marginalized others. Dance and movement techniques were at the very forefront of this genre of performance. The body became a central motif, functioning as an emblem of political emancipation, ethnic superiority, nostalgic tradition and/or a mechanized symbol of modernity.
Wigman, Mary (1886–1973)
Authors: Müller Hedwig
Published: September 2018

Mary Wigman was among the most important dancers and choreographers in Germany during the first half of the 20th century. As a modernist, she sought out new artistic directions and radically rejected dance conventions and traditions, particularly classical ballet. Together with her teacher Rudolf Laban, she pioneered German Ausdruckstanz. She initially developed her style as a solo dancer, then as a basis for group choreography and as a pedagogical method. Wigman believed that a dance should be derived from subjective feeling and that a dancer must seek an individual form for his or her dance expression. Between 1920 and 1942, she ran a Dresden-based dance school that was the focal point for modern dance in Europe. From there, her artistic influence spread to many countries across Europe and the Americas, even reaching as far as Japan. Her choreographic career peaked between 1920 and the onset of the Nazi dictatorship in 1933. During the Nazi years, she continued to choreograph and perform, ending her career as a dancer in 1942, when she closed her school in Dresden. She then focused on teaching, first in Leipzig until 1948 and then in West Berlin until 1967. She still did choreograph on occasion, although it was her pedagogy that impacted later generations, in particular students who later became leading figures within Tanztheater ("dance theatre"), a German movement that, in turn, became globally influential.
Smart, Elizabeth (1913–1986)
Authors: Virani Zaqir Husein
Published: September 2018

Elizabeth Smart was a Canadian poet and novelist, best known for By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept– a novella-length work of prose poetry that weaves surrealist, personalist, feminist, and anarchist ideals with Canadian, American, and European political sentiments.

Smart was born to prominent Canadian lawyer Russel Smart and his wife Emma Louise Parr–two of Ottawa’s more storied socialites. The Smart family frequently hosted Ottawa’s noted political and dramatic figures, affording their children the opportunity to grow up in the company of poet Duncan Campbell Scott, Canadian broadcasting pioneer Graham Spry, and William Lyon Mackenzie King, the tenth Prime Minister of Canada.
El Guindi, Yussef (1960–)
Authors: Hammouda Sally
Published: September 2018

Yussef El Guindi is an Egyptian/Arab-American playwright. He was born in Egypt, educated in London, and is currently a resident of Seattle, USA. He received his BA degree from the American University in Cairo and MFA in Playwriting from Carnegie-Mellon University. He writes about cultural and political collisions of ethnic minorities, especially Arab-Americans. Most of his plays are about Arab-Americans trying to fit into the American way of life and some of the clashes that arise as a result.
Federal Theatre Project (1935–9)
Authors: Witham Barry B.
Published: September 2018

The Federal Theatre Project was a government-subsidized program established in 1935 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to provide jobs for theater artists during the Great Depression in the United States. Along with similar programs in art, music, dance, and writing, the project was designed to produce professional theater throughout the country and eventually established companies in thirty-one American states. While the fare of the program was broad, including circuses, vaudeville, musicals, and children’s theater, its offerings were largely progressive, which led to conflicts with Congressional Republicans who viewed the program as propaganda for New Deal politics. Eventually, charges of communism led to an investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the budgetary elimination of Federal Theatre in 1939.
Irish Modernism
Authors: Barber Fionna
Published: September 2018

Modernism in Ireland was bound up with major social and political factors during the first part of the twentieth century, especially the effects of independence and Partition in 1922 and the role of the visual within national identity. This is an important context for Irish artists’ engagement with the wider development of European modernism; Cubism and Expressionism were particularly significant and, to a lesser extent, Surrealism. In 1910 the painters Paul and Grace Henry traveled from Dublin to Achill Island on Ireland’s Western Seaboard, where they remained until the end of World War I. This move, to some degree, emulated the earlier example of European avant-garde artists—such as Paul Gauguin in abandoning Paris for initially Brittany and then Tahiti—but it was also a sign of the fascination with the West that became an important cultural focus for an independent Ireland. The rural West, Catholic and Gaelic speaking, in many ways embodied the ideologies of the new Irish Free State. In addition to being the subject of Henry’s pastel-toned landscapes it became a major focus for both realist artists such as Seán Keating and modernist painters including Jack B. Yeats and Patrick Collins.
Israeli Art Music
Authors: Shelleg Assaf
Published: September 2018

Israeli Art Music concerns the study of art music penned in the Jewish community of mandatory Palestine, which since 14 May 1948 is the State of Israel. Having emerged before the year of statehood, the term "Israeli art music" is therefore a misnomer – the result of a national historical back shadowing attesting to its post-statehood coinage. Indeed, from a cultural-historical perspective, the emergence of art music in mandatory Palestine and later Israel involves larger confluences: the rise of Zionism, the political achievements of the Jewish community in Palestine, the Nazis ascent to power in the 1930s, and the various musical schools dislocated to Palestine during the different waves of immigrations to the country. Thus, the story of Israeli art music begins from the middle: it opens in the 1930s with the arrival of a critical mass of emigrant composers whose importations of a variety of twentieth-century compositional approaches triggered vast cultural chain reactions beyond the earmarks of a nationalistic style. The home of more than seventy nationalities, Israel’s most important cultural asset is its ethnic proximities. Using the melodic and harmonic characteristics of mostly non-western Jewish and non-Jewish oral musical traditions available in this region, composers have been able to re-localize universal compositional devices and create new musical hybrids that resist a fixed musical definition. Indeed, the constant proliferation of styles suggests that perhaps the procedure of local hybridization itself, beyond specific folkish or liturgical citations, is the very definition of Israeli art music.
Lawson, John Howard (1894–1977)
Authors: Chambers Jonathan
Published: September 2018

John Howard Lawson was born in New York City on September 25, 1894. His first major play, Roger Bloomer (1923), advanced expressionism in the United States, trading the pessimism that frequently defined the form for optimism. Processional (1925), produced by the Theatre Guild, was also formally adventurous. Combining jazz, vaudeville, and Dada, and focussing on a labor dispute, it is Lawson’s masterwork.