bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Walcott, Derek (1930--)
Authors: Emery Mary Lou
Published: September 2018

World-renowned poet, playwright and essayist Derek Walcott won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. He grew up in his birthplace, Castries, St Lucia, immersed in the landscape, history, and creolized cultures of the Caribbean. In his writing, Walcott expresses both anguish for the wounds inflicted by the past, and joy for the beauty of the West Indies. For Walcott, art is the revolutionary medium through which to seek the transcendence of racial and regional divisions; he achieves universality in his art through love of what is particular to the Caribbean.

Drawing on canonical modernist influences such as Eliot, Joyce, and Yeats — and the classics of Western literature that also inspired them — Walcott’s writing emerged during the West Indian cultural nationalism of the 1950s–1970s and alongside the Latin American ‘boom,’ developing into a postcolonial modernism. His work is especially attentive to the natural environment of the West Indies, and proposes an Adamic imagination that sees and names the New World afresh. Much of his writing re-envisions sea-voyaging literary figures such as Robinson Crusoe and, especially, Odysseus, while also exploring the journeys taken and obstacles faced by the contemporary poet.
Brandes, Georg Morris Cohen (1842–1927)
Authors: Allen Julie
Published: September 2018

The Danish literary critic Georg Brandes is known as the force behind the modern breakthrough in Scandinavian literature in the late 19th century. Inspired by French naturalists such as Hippolyte Taine and Émile Zola, Brandes called for the development of a realistic literary style that debates social problems. His treatise Hovedstrømninger I det 19de Aarhundredes Literatur [Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature] (1872) influenced a generation of Scandinavian and European authors, including August Strindberg, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Arthur Schnitzler. Through his extensive journalistic activity, international lecture tours, and voluminous correspondence, Brandes popularized Scandinavian modernist literature throughout continental Europe, in particular the works of Henrik Ibsen and J. P. Jacobsen. He was instrumental in introducing Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche to the public. Brandes later focused on writing biographies of "great men," such as Goethe, Shakespeare, and Caesar, and speaking out against the oppression of minority populations across Europe. His opposition to European imperialism and the First World War alienated many supporters, including French prime minister Georges Clemenceau and English scholar William Archer, but earned him the respect of his country, which had declared neutrality.
Ogden, C. K. (1889–1957)
Authors: Beard David
Published: September 2018

British writer, publisher and scholar Charles Kay Ogden was active in the field of linguistics and language. He is best known for The Meaning of Meaning (1923), a book co-authored with I. A. Richards, which would change semiotics permanently by offering a triadic model, consisting of symbol, referent and thought, which would replace Ferdinand de Saussure’s dyadic semiotics of signifier and signified. Ogden was active in the proliferation of English modernist literature and thought as the editor and publisher of several periodicals: Cambridge Magazine, which published notables like Thomas Hardy and George Bernard Shaw as well as Ogden’s own work; Psyche: A Journal of General and Linguistic Psychology, which he founded in 1920; and The International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method, which published works by Carl Jung, T. E. Hulme, Max Black, Jean Piaget, Bronisław Malinowski, G. E. Moore and others. Ogden edited Jeremy Bentham’s Theory of Fictions (1932), but his most significant contribution as an editor was to commission F. P. Ramsey (1903–1930) to translate into English Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a work that would alter the course of philosophy of language.
Remarque, Erich Maria (1898–1970)
Authors: Gammel Irene
Published: September 2018

Born Erich Paul Remark in Osnabrück, Germany, Erich Maria Remarque is best known for his influential anti-war novel Im Westen nichts Neues (1929, All Quiet on the Western Front). First serialized in the Vossische Zeitung in 1928, All Quiet was launched with an unprecedented advertising campaign. Hailed as ‘the great war novel’, the book spawned a world-wide readership with translations into over twenty-five languages, and a film (directed by Lewis Milestone) in 1930. Written within just a few months in 1927, All Quiet on the Western Front toys with autobiographical references. The protagonist Paul Bäumer is a nineteen-year old war veteran whose seemingly non-consequential death in October 1918, on a ‘quiet’ day on the Western front, stands for the shared fate of millions of soldiers obscured by the unprecedented violence and horror of World War I. Remarque changed his name after the war, dropping his middle name Paul, and adopting his mother’s name, Maria, while also Gallicizing the spelling of his last name, thereby blurring national boundaries.
Shi’r
Authors: Luce Mark D.
Published: September 2018

The journal, Shi’r (Poetry 1957–70) was established in Beirut by Yūsuf al-Khāl and the poet theorist Adunis to save poetry from politics. It emerged as a professional avant-garde monthly journal with a core group of young poets dedicated to poetry and poetic studies. The journal supported poetic experimentation. Shi’r advocated for the prose poem as a way to spark cultural change, believing that innovative efforts were necessary to intellectually modernize the Arab World.

Shi’r rebelled against the ‘committed literature’ (al-adab al-multazim) movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The circle believed this to be ‘a prostitution of art’ to political causes and ideologies. Shi’r was perceived as a subversive cultural movement. It was banned in a number of countries, accused of supporting a culture war against Arab nationalism, and of being funded by the CIA and French intelligence, inter alia.

Shi’r’s poets were more concerned with the post-colonial Arab ‘state of being’ than reforming or overthrowing states. The Shi’r poets adopted the concept of ru’iya or vision theorized in 1959 by Adunis (Ali Ahmad Said) who asserted that modern poetry possessed a mystical or intuitive knowledge that allowed the poet to see beyond. The intention was to liberate Arab consciousness and to liberate it from the qasidah using the Arabic language, to free one’s thinking.
Sinclair, May (1863–1946)
Authors: Randall Bryony
Published: September 2018

May Sinclair was a novelist, journalist and literary critic. She began writing relatively late in life to help support her family, and while most of her novels would most obviously be categorized as realist, she was a great advocate for the experimentation of writers such as Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, and is perhaps most influential today as a literary critic of modernism; she was for example the first critic to use the term ‘stream of consciousness’ in relation to literature.

Her first commercial success came with her third novel The Divine Fire (1904), a philosophical novel combining a love story with an exploration and critique of the contemporary literary marketplace. Subsequent novels focused largely on social and/or marriage problems, prominent themes in literature of the period. A committed campaigner for women’s rights, her World War I novels (Tasker Jevons: the Real Story of 1916 and The Tree of Heaven of 1917) express her support for the war at a time when the suffrage movement was split between pacifist and pro-combat factions. She wrote two identifiably experimental novels, Mary Olivier (1919) and The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922), both significantly influenced by her interest in psychoanalysis.
Singer, Isaac Bashevis (1904–1991)
Authors: Furnish Ben
Published: September 2018

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in Leoncin, Poland, where his father was a Hasidic rabbi. He grew up between 1908–1917 in Warsaw and from 1917–1921 in Bilgoray (Biłgoraj), which shaped his knowledge of small-town Jewish life. The younger brother of Yiddish writers Israel Joshua Singer and Esther Kreitman, Singer began reading secular literature at 10, and after years of religious study, he eventually followed his brother into Warsaw’s bohemian literary Yiddish community, translating several modern writers into Yiddish.

Singer’s first novel, Der Sotn in Goray [Satan in Goray], set in seventeenth-century Poland with the background of pogroms and the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi, appeared in 1934, and the next year, he joined Israel Joshua in New York City where both wrote for the Yiddish press. In 1950, Singer married Alma Haimann Wassermann, a German Jewish immigrant from a once-wealthy family, who supported the couple by working as a retail clerk. Singer wrote in Yiddish for his entire life; most of his novels were serialized in the Jewish Daily Forward Yiddish newspaper. Unlike most great Yiddish writers, he found success in translation, particularly after Saul Bellow’s translation of the story ‘Gimpel the Fool’ appeared in Partisan Review in 1953.
Collage
Authors: Child Danielle
Published: September 2018

Collage is an artistic technique first used in the 20th century in which paper, photographs, fabric, and other items are glued onto paper or canvas. Collage was central to the development of Cubism and, in particular, to the work of Pablo Picasso and George Braque. Braque is said to have invented papiercollé, a specific form of collage where paper strips and fragments are pasted onto the drawing or painting. In 1912, the two artists began to introduce paper, cigarette packets, newspapers, and other items associated with everyday life into their canvases; Braque stated that he introduced these items into his work for their ‘‘materiality.’’ Picasso wrote that ‘‘the purpose of papiercollé was to give the idea that different textures can enter into a composition to become reality in the painting that competes with reality in nature.’’ For example, the artist would introduce paper that represented wood panelling for an image of a guitar. This countered the trompe l’oeil effects of painting, with Picasso proposing that the object created by collage was a ‘‘displaced object’’ that reflected their ‘‘strange’’ world. It can be argued that these fragments reflected the fragmentation of the modern world under capitalism, and closely aligns to the montage technique found in modernist mediums including writing, such as that of Walter Benjamin, the photography of artists such as Hannah Höch, and work of filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov.
Williams, Raymond (1921–1988)
Authors: Wallace Jeff
Published: September 2018

The critic, cultural historian and novelist Raymond Williams was an influential theorist of the emergence of literary and cultural modernism, and a key figure in the development of British literary and cultural theory. He is widely recognized as the founder of the discipline of cultural studies and of the theory of cultural materialism.

Born in the Welsh border village of Pandy in 1921, Williams attended Grammar School in Abergavenny, and then Cambridge University, where he resumed his studies in 1945 after military service. Following a period of teaching in adult education, Williams was appointed to a Chair in Drama at Cambridge University in 1961, which he occupied until his untimely death in 1988. Since the late 1930s, Williams had been drawn to German Expressionist film and the fiction of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce. His interests in Naturalist drama and the movement beyond it into modernist experimentation are encoded in a sustained engagement with Ibsen’s work, first in Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (1952), and then in Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (1969), the latter updated to include an account of the ‘complex seeing’ of Bertolt Brecht’s modernist stagecraft.
Saarinen, Gottlieb Eliel (1873–1950)
Authors: Johnson Michael
Published: September 2018

Gottlieb Eliel Saarinen, better known as Eliel Saarinen, was an architect who practiced in his native Finland for twenty-five years before beginning a new phase of his career in the United States. He initially worked in a Jugendstil manner and played a central role in developing the national romanticist style that emerged in several European countries c.1890–1901. Immigrating to the USA in 1923, he gravitated toward the minimalist functionalism of the Modern Movement. Saarinen designed the campus for the Cranbrook Academy of Art, and, under his stewardship, the academy became one of the most influential design schools in the country.
Teige, Karel (1900–1951)
Authors: Holá Mariana
Published: September 2018

Karel Teige was a Czech theoretician of art and architecture, an artist and typographer, and an organizer of the Czech avant-garde. He was one of the founders of Devětsil, an association of Czech avant-garde artists, and a spokesman of the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia. He maintained contacts with numerous European avant-garde artists and informed the Czech art milieu about the latest developments. As author of several manifestos and art theories, Teige was instrumental in the emergence of a range of new artistic genres such as picture poems, Poetism, and Artificialism in the 1920s.
Ailey, Alvin (1931–1989)
Authors: Fisher-Harrell Linda-Denise
Published: September 2018

Alvin Ailey counts among the most significant American choreographers of the second half of the twentieth century, and his company the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT) as one of the most widely known companies both nationally and internationally. Initially established in 1958 as a small pick-up company of black dancers, AAADT quickly developed into a multiracial company that not only served as a platform for Ailey’s works but also became a repository for works by many different choreographers in a wide variety of styles. Communicating to a broad audience base, Ailey made the black dancing body integral to modern dance. In the tradition of the Lester Horton Dance Theater, Ailey stressed ethnic diversity and a broad artistic range. AAADT remains a primarily black yet multiracial company that continues the heritage of American modern dance while preserving the uniqueness of the African American cultural experience.
Black Dance
Authors: Johnson Jasmine
Published: September 2018

Black dance is both an aesthetic and historical category. When the term first appeared in the late 1960s, it referred to dance forms grounded in African Americans’ collective experience, but over time the term "black dance" has come to encompass both vernacular (social) and theatrical (stage) dance created by African-descended peoples in the United States and around the world. From the Cakewalk to the Charleston to the Lindy Hop to rock and roll dancing, twentieth-century social dances emerged first within black subcultures and then circulated broadly within dominant cultures. Over the same period, black artists commanded the international dance stage, from Bert Williams and George Walker to Josephine Baker to Katherine Dunham to Alvin Ailey. In everyday life and on the concert stage, black dance is a constitutive dimension of modernism.
Kazuo, Ohno (1906–2010)
Authors: Candelario Rosemary
Published: September 2018

When Ohno Kazuo died at age 103, he was an international legend memorialized in newspapers around the world as a Japanese modern dancer, a pioneer of butoh, and a captivating performer of astounding depth and playfulness. However, the phase of his performance career that led to this worldwide renown did not begin until age seventy-three with a 1980 performance at the Nancy International Theatre Festival. With that performance and subsequent frequent touring, Ohno played a significant role in introducing butoh to the world, some twenty years after its initial development by Hikikata Tatsumi, Ohno, and a group of Tokyo-based dancers.
Acting
Authors: Walker Julia A.
Published: September 2018

Acting on the modern stage ranges from the psychological realism of Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863–1938) to the sensory assault of Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) to the didactic presentation of Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), to name only three of the best-known styles. While the range and variety of acting styles is not unique to the modern stage, the self-conscious delineation of those styles—both in relation to and as theories of representation—is. Previously, an actor’s performance—often of a well-known dramatic text—was regarded as his or her own interpretation of a role, assessed in relation to other actors’ forays in that part. But with the development of advanced stage machinery, allowing for elaborate scenic and lighting designs, acting became only one of many elements from which to make a theatrical work of art, displacing the actor from the center to the margins of the creative process. Assuming center stage were the playwright and director. The passage of an international copyright agreement in 1891 meant that playwrights could exercise more authorial control over their dramatic designs. And, in order to realize the material dimensions of such dramas in performance, the specialized position of the director emerged to coordinate the increasingly complex elements of the production. Consequently, modernist styles of acting developed in relation to the textual and directorial constraints of the newly configured modern theater.
Craig, Edward Gordon (1872–1966)
Authors: Taxidou Olga
Published: September 2018

Edward Gordon Craig was one of the leading figures of modernist theater. His books, stage designs, manifestos, and collaborations all contributed to an understanding of performance as an autonomous aesthetic activity, as a creative event that does not rely solely on the multifaceted transpositions of the literary text, but offers a unique, synaesthetic possibility of combining different art forms. Craig’s work was crucial in conceiving of performance as a live, ephemeral but dynamic event that may derive from a literary text but is never confined to it.
Rakesh, Mohan (1925–1972)
Authors: Dharwadker Aparna
Published: September 2018

Mohan Rakesh was a leading twentieth-century Indian author whose drama, fiction, and criticism played a pivotal role in the Indian modernist movement after independence (1947–), and whose work continues to exert a strong literary-artistic influence through the mediums of print as well as performance. He wrote primarily in Hindi, India’s majority language, but some critical essays were written originally in English, and his work in multiple genres has been translated widely into English as well as other major Indian and European languages since the 1960s. In relation to postcolonial and global modernisms, Rakesh exemplifies the cosmopolitan urban Indian writer whose authorial self-positioning responds carefully to the effects of British colonialism, European modernity, and the complex literary history of a major language such as Hindi.
Rice, Elmer (1892–1967)
Authors: Chambers Jonathan
Published: September 2018

Born Elmer Reizenstein in New York City on September 28, 1892, Elmer Rice’s career spanned nearly fifty years. He wrote over fifty plays, including collaborations with Dorothy Parker (Close Harmony, 1924), Philip Barry (Cock Robin, 1928), and Langston Hughes and Kurt Weill (the musical adaptation of Street Scene, 1947), and explored a variety of dramatic forms. His professional theater debut came two years after graduation from New York Law School, with the enormously successfully On Trial (1914), a crime drama noted for its use of flashback. An antiwar play, The Iron Cross (1915), followed. Both works exemplify a career-long interest in inflecting the melodramatic form with new methods and in exploring the complexities of modern life. These inclinations are seen in The Adding Machine (1923) and Street Scene (1929). The former, a critique of the machine age, is a model of American expressionism; the latter advanced stage realism in the United States with a disorienting depiction of urban life. While these plays demonstrate an interest in new techniques, they are also rooted in melodrama and sought to promote liberal democratic social reform. Street Scene was awarded the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Evans, Walker (1903–1975)
Authors: Slipp Naomi
Published: September 2018

Walker Evans was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration during the American Depression. His documentary style, historically regarded as detached, is now viewed as characteristic of Evans’s own point of view.

Born to an affluent family in St. Louis, Missouri, Evans studied literature at Williams College before moving to Paris in 1926. In 1928, Evans moved to New York City and began taking photographs, citing Eugène Atget as an influence. He was given a solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1932. He traveled to Havana in the following year. The photographs taken there reveal a country in the midst of a revolution, and were published in The Crime of Cuba (1933) alongside text by journalist Carleton Beals. Two years later, Evans began working for Fortune magazine, eventually contributing over four hundred images to the publication before his departure in 1965. Evans’s penetrating documentary images express an interest in the everyday lives of individuals, balancing senses of both intimacy and detachment. His photographs of the Depression are considered some of the most iconic images of that era.
Reinhardt, Max (1873–1943)
Authors: Switzky Lawrence
Published: September 2018

Born Max Goldmann to Jewish parents in Baden, Austria and nicknamed "the Magician" by the press, Max Reinhardt was pivotal in establishing theater directing as an art form in the early twentieth century. Although he apprenticed as an actor in naturalist productions directed by Otto Brahm at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin from 1893 to 1903, he built his reputation by championing expressionism and other antirealist theatrical movements in productions that toured throughout Europe and the United States. Reinhardt’s eclectic roster, from spectacular stagings of Shakespeare to intimate productions of plays by Frank Wedekind and August Strindberg, brought innovative production methods and experimental drama to a mass audience, while training major figures in modern theater and film, including Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, and Ernst Lubitsch.
Griffith, David Wark (1875–1948)
Authors: Wiedenfeld Grant
Published: September 2018

American film director D.W. Griffith was a pivotal figure in cinema’s ascendance as a mass medium and modern art form. He is best known for developing editing techniques, such as montage, that brought a new fluency and excitement to cinematic storytelling. He is also remembered for directing the racist blockbuster The Birth of a Nation, a film that has become iconic in prejudiced circles for its anti-African American message.

Born in rural Kentucky, Griffith came of age in the bustling popular theater as an actor and aspiring writer. Economic necessity led him to the Biograph Company, a film studio in New York City, where he would direct hundreds of films from 1908 to 1913, a period in film history known as the "Transition Era." Cinema grew from a fairground attraction to a self-conscious art, exemplified by the feature-length fictional works that arose and were screened in dedicated theaters, with star actors and artists, during this time. The first wave of film historians gave Griffith credit for inventing the montage technique: a modern set of editing methods unique to cinema, the most notable being "parallel editing," which created suspense or drew meaningful contrast by cutting from one line of action to another. Griffith also discovered and cultivated young star actresses such as Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford, and publicized his own authorship while the industry refrained from displaying credits. He participated in the formation of a new cartel of studios that shifted the American industry to Hollywood, California in the mid-1910s.
Rohmer, Éric (1920–2010)
Authors: Ionita Maria
Published: September 2018

Éric Rohmer (born Jean-Marie-Maurice Schéer) was a French film director, screenwriter, and film critic, best known for his association with the French New Wave, and his sophisticated films exploring the intersections of romantic desire and moral choice. A student of literature, theology, and philosophy with a degree in history, Rohmer started as a teacher, but soon gravitated, like many future New Wave directors, toward Henri Langlois’ Cinémathèque Française and he also began writing for Cahiers du cinéma in 1951. He was its editor from 1957 to 1963.
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
Authors: Zenari Vivian
Published: September 2018

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), an experimental film by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, is considered an American avant-garde watershed. The husband–wife team played the parts of the unnamed man and woman and filmed in their Hollywood home.
A Movie (1958)
Authors: Gosse Johanna
Published: September 2018

A Movie (1958) is a twelve-minute compilation montage of vintage newsreels, soft-core "girlie movies," low-budget Westerns, educational and ethnographic films, and other black and white 16mm film ephemera. Filmmaker Bruce Conner selected scenes ranging from the anonymous and slightly absurd—stampeding horses, car crashes, tightrope walkers, half-nude women, and deep sea divers—to more historically specific, even iconic images: the Hindenburg in flames, Teddy Roosevelt orating, the Tacoma bridge collapse of 1940, and, most strikingly, the 1946 underwater atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll.
Lin, Yutang (林语堂) (1895–1976)
Authors: Wang Jason
Published: September 2018

Lin Yutang (林语堂) was a major figure in the development of twentieth-century Chinese modernity. He was a scholar, inventor, educator and translator, as well as a writer who explored themes of anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism in books disseminated widely in China and the West. Born into a Chinese Presbyterian minister’s family in the province of Fujian, Lin Yutang was educated in comparative literature and philology (including doctoral studies) at universities in Shanghai, Boston (Harvard) and Leipzig. As a professor at Peking University (1923–1926) and university administrator in China (1926), Lin became renowned for promoting Western literature, thought and technology, whilst also working to disseminate classic Chinese literature in the West.
Plessy vs. Ferguson
Authors: Borup Whitney
Published: September 2018

Plessy vs. Ferguson is a legal decision made by the United States Supreme Court upholding the constitutionality of ‘separate but equal’ laws popular in the post-Civil War South. In June 1892 Homer Plessy, a man with one-eighth African blood, was arrested for violating Louisiana’s ‘equal but separate’ clause when he sat in a railway car designated for white passengers. Louisiana district court judge, Justice John Howard Ferguson, upheld the arrest, claiming a state had the legal power to regulate railroads operating within its borders.
Turing, Alan Mathison (1912–1954)
Authors: Bradley Adam James
Published: September 2018

Alan Mathison Turing is known as the father of modern computer science. Of his early achievements he helped to bring the Second World War to a close by deciphering the Nazis’ encryption machine, Enigma. As an undergraduate, Turing developed a new proof of the Central Limit Theorem. This led to graduate work at King’s College, where he wrote what may be his most important work, the 1936 paper entitled ‘On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem’. In this paper, Turing answered the problem posed by German mathematician David Hilbert in 1928 calling for a proof of a decision procedure. His approach to this proof led to the concept of what is now known as Turing Machines.
Lindsay, Vachel (1879–1931)
Authors: Gerow Aaron
Published: September 2018

Vachel Lindsay was an American poet whose concern for developing a new, popular American language led him to become one of the first people to write a serious account of motion picture aesthetics. Born in Springfield, Illinois, Lindsay was pressured by his parents to become a doctor, but left Hiram College to study art in Chicago and New York. Encouraged to become a poet, he began wandering the country, reading and selling poetry in exchange for food, in the style of the medieval troubadours. Poems such as ‘General William Booth Enters Heaven’ and ‘The Congo’, which offered a rustic and populist vision of democratic community and American national identity – as well as an exoticist vision of American ‘others’– made him famous nationwide, but he was most noted for his energetic performances of his poetry, which emphasized their musical qualities. His background in art and his personal ties to Abraham Lincoln (who shared the same hometown) and American culture led him to seek out forms of communication that were clear, direct, and popular, which he found in hieroglyphics and the cinema. His typology of film genres–Action (to him, sculpture-in-motion), Intimacy (painting-in-motion), and Splendour (architecture-in-motion)–emphasized cinema not only as actively visual, but also as acting on the audience, making it a new machine for educating and reconfirming American community.
Pulp Modernism
Authors: Sorensen Leif
Published: September 2018

Pulp magazines are named for the low-quality pulpwood paper on which they were printed. They are part of the modernist periodical marketplace along with the slicks, published on glossy paper, and little magazines. The age of the all-fiction pulp magazine in the United States extends from 1896 to 1955. The low cost of pulpwood paper, advances in printing technology, expansions in the postal system, and streamlined distribution methods enabled the pulps to reach readers everywhere.
Heide Circle
Authors: Haese Richard
Published: September 2018

The group of avant-garde Australian artists and their supporters, now identified as the Heide Circle, evolved over three decades, from the pioneering modernism of the early 1930s through the post-war era of the mid-1960s. These Melbourne-based artists constituted the essential core of radical Australian modernism; the early phase including, most notably, Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, and the Russian-born émigré Danila Vassilieff. The work of these pioneering artists demonstrated a highly original antipodean response to European expressionist, cubist, and surrealist movements, together with a new fascination with untutored and naïve art. The group shared personal and institutional support from the art collectors and patrons John and Sunday Reed, whose semi-rural home called ‘‘Heide‘‘ on the outskirts of Melbourne became the focus of the movement. In 1938, the Reeds spearheaded the establishment of the Contemporary Art Society (CAS) in order to promote the modernist movement in Australian art. Along with the young poet Max Harris, the Reeds also began publishing the key cultural journal Angry Penguins, which was dedicated to championing radical art and literature. These initiatives eventually collapsed in 1947. However, the revival of the CAS in 1953 initiated a second phase of the Heide circle, together with a new generation of artists.
Rachilde (1860–1953)
Authors: Hawthorne Melanie
Published: September 2018

Known mainly for her prose fiction of the Decadent period, the French writer Rachilde contributed to modernist theater in a number of ways. She was an important figure in French symbolist theatres of the 1890s (particularly Paul Fort’s Théâtre d’art and Aurélien Lugné-Poe’s Théâtre de l’oeuvre). She had several of her own plays produced, and came into contact with artist groups such as the Nabis (Paul Gauguin designed the program for her 1891 play Madame La Mort). The Symbolists introduced Scandinavian dramatists such as Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg to French audiences, and Rachilde’s plays were exported to countries such as Denmark.
Coleman, Emily Holmes (1899–1974)
Authors: Podnieks Elizabeth
Published: September 2018

Emily Holmes Coleman was an American poet, short-story writer, novelist, and diarist.

Emily Tyler Holmes was born on January 22, 1899, in Oakland, California, to John Milton Holmes, an insurance executive, and Lucy Adams Coaney, who was sent to a psychiatric home when Coleman was seven. After attending a New Jersey boarding school, Coleman studied English at Wellesley College from 1916–20, and in 1921 married Loyd (sic) ‘Deak’ Coleman, who joined the advertising firm of J. Walter Thompson in 1928. Following the birth of their only child, John (1924–1990), Coleman developed toxic exhaustive psychosis and was institutionalized for two months in the Rochester State Hospital. Her trauma informs her surrealistic novel, The Shutter of Snow (1930), groundbreaking for its treatment of post-partum depression.
Orwell, George (1903–1950)
Authors: Boland Stephanie
Published: September 2018

George Orwell is the pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair. A writer, poet, journalist, broadcaster and critic, he is best known for his satirical novel Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), both of which interrogate political systems (and the behavior of the individual within them). The term ‘Orwellian’, meaning ‘following the logic of totalitarianism’, is primarily drawn from these novels. His long-form non-fiction works Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) exemplify his particular brand of social reportage, as well as being some of the most well-known works in the genre generally. Both document life among the poor: the former taking in London’s East End and the less prosperous parts of Paris, and the latter the working-class cities in England’s industrial North.

Orwell’s writing is characterized by straightforward, unembellished prose. His 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ draws a correlation between writing and ideology, lambasting ‘insincerity’ in contemporary written English. This unadorned style helps inform today’s consensus that Orwell was a profoundly common sense writer, committed to clarity in both language and argument. His literary criticism, political reportage, and polemic journalism have been frequently anthologized since his death, and are often held up as models in their respective genres.
Czernowin, Chaya (1957–)
Authors: Barden Mark
Published: September 2018

Arguably the most important Israeli composer to emerge in the late twentieth century, Czernowin, born 7 December in Haifa, is much sought after as a composer and pedagogue in the United States and Europe. She earned a BA in 1982 at the Rubin Academy of Music, Tel-Aviv University, an MFA in 1987 at Bard College, and a PhD in 1993 at the University of California San Diego. Her principal teachers include Abel Ehrlich, Dieter Schnebel, Brian Ferneyhough and Roger Reynolds. Among her many honours and distinctions are the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis (1992), a year residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (1996), an Ernst von Siemens Stiftung Förderpreis (2003), the Fromm Foundation Award (2008), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011). She has held professorships at the University of California San Diego, Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts and Harvard University. In addition to faculty positions at major contemporary music festivals like the Darmstadt Summer Courses, impuls academy, and the SWR Experimentalstudio’s matrix academy, Czernowin has initiated elite international courses for young composers on three continents: the Summer Academy at Schloss Solitude (Germany), Tzlil Meudcan (Israel), and Harvard’s Summer Composition Institute (USA).
Leitmotif
Authors: Boes Tobias
Published: September 2018

A leitmotif (from the German Leitmotiv: ‘guiding motif’) in its original sense is a musical theme that appears multiple times over the course of a dramatic composition and thereby gives a person, object, place or concept both a symbolic form and coherence over time. It is primarily associated with the mature works of Richard Wagner, who disliked the term, however. A leitmotif differs from earlier examples of recurring musical themes by virtue of the fact that it can change over time and develop additional significance through its relationship to other musical themes. Thus, the ascending ‘nature motif’ that opens Wagner’s operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) finds a descending counterpart in the later ‘contract motif’. Taken together, the two themes thus spell out a fundamental contrast between the natural and the social world that runs throughout the cycle. Because of the huge influence of Wagner’s art on all aspects of Modernism, leitmotifs can be found not only in musical compositions, but also in literature, particularly in the novels of Thomas Mann and James Joyce.
Fauvism
Authors: Somers-Davis Lynn M.
Published: September 2018

French Fauvism (c. 1904–1907) comprised a loosely formed group of painters whose mentor, Henri Matisse (1869–1954), argued for a new approach to painting, integrating the chromatic lessons of Neo-Impressionism, the symbolist evocation of sensation through color and form and the expressive nature of the artist. The style was not programmatically theorized until it was essentially over, and yet Fauvism fundamentally shifted the course of modern painting, anticipating Cubism, Orphism and abstract painting. Fauvism incorporated bold, brash colors, often applied directly from commercially produced tubes of paint; gestural and broken brush-work; lack of finish; and color used for expression rather than description, resulting in flattened and distorted perspectives that radically diverged from mimetic representation. While its pictorial advances shocked conservative critics and audiences of its time, Fauvism – like many early avant-garde movements – maintained an appreciation of historical painting and its iconographies (landscape, cityscape, still life, and portraiture). Similar to Expressionism, Fauvism differed significantly from the German schools Die Brücke (Dresden, 1905–13) and Der Blaue Reiter (Munich, 1911–14) in its stress on pleasing decorative and synthetic effects.
Fry, Roger Eliot (1866–1934)
Authors: Rubin Adrianne
Published: September 2018

Roger Fry was an art critic, painter, lecturer, and curator whose name is often associated with the Bloomsbury Group. Born in London to a prominent Quaker family, Fry was educated at King’s College, Cambridge, where he became one of the famed Cambridge Apostles. He studied natural sciences, earning first-class honours, though his true love was art. He studied painting under the tutelage of Francis Bate in London in 1889 and at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1892. Though he considered himself a painter first and foremost, Fry was most respected as a critic of art. He is best remembered as a proponent of modern French painting, having coined the term ‘Post-Impressionism’ in 1910 as he was organizing the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries in London. Two years later, Fry curated The Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition with Clive Bell and Boris von Anrep. In 1913, Fry opened a decorative arts firm called the Omega Workshops in the Bloomsbury section of London. Duncan Grant (1885–1978) and Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) were also members of the Omega, which shut down in 1919 due to financial struggles and personal tensions. Both as an art critic and a painter Fry was a Formalist. He promulgated the belief that subject matter in a work of art is secondary to the formal properties of a work – line, mass, colour, and spatial relationships – because formal qualities, he believed, hold universal appeal and are neither culture- nor time-specific. These views are made apparent in Fry’s copious writings.
Munch, Edvard (1863–1944)
Authors: Gluchowska Lidia
Published: September 2018

Edvard Munch was a Norwegian painter, printmaker and sculptor, who experimented with photography and film. He is one of the main forerunners of Expressionism, and his painting The Scream (1893) became a universal icon of existentialist fear. He was born in Løten, Norway, in 1863 and died in Oslo in 1944.

In 1879 Munch enrolled at a technical college and in 1881 at the Royal School of Art and Design of Christiania, where he took lessons in freehand drawing and modeling. In 1882 he was supervised by the naturalistic painter Christian Krohg, and in 1883 he held his first public exhibition. In 1885 Munch travelled to Paris; some influences of French art were recognizable in the works he presented at his first one-man show in Christiania in 1889. The recognition he received with this exhibition gained him a state scholarship to Paris for the period 1889–92. There he studied under French painter Léon Bonnat and saw works by Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and James Whistler. Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Synthetism influenced his work of this period.
Portocarrero, René (1912–1985)
Authors: Estevez Lisandra
Published: September 2018

Part of the Cuban vanguardia (or vanguard movement), René Portocarrero broke with the academic style of art that prevailed in Cuba in order to create a modern visual language that expressed his cultural identity. Born in Havana on 24 February 1912, René Portocarrero was one of the great second-generation artists of the Cuban avant-garde movement. Multi-talented, he was a painter of easel pictures, ceramicist, illustrator, muralist and set designer. Portocarrero’s early works were expressionist in style and explored a varied body of subject matter that was inspired by his native country.
Rivera, Diego (1886–1957)
Authors: Black June I. K.
Published: September 2018

Diego Rivera was an artist born in 1886 in the Mexican city of Guanajuato. The family relocated to Mexico City in 1892 as a consequence of the liberal politics of Rivera’s father. In the capital, Rivera was educated at the National Preparatory School and the National School of Fine Arts (formerly known as the Academy of San Carlos), where he studied under Félix Parra, Santiago Rebull, and José María Velasco. In 1904, he met Dr. Atl, who was likely the first to encourage Rivera to explore Modernism. By utilizing the multifaceted, compressed, and interlocking planes characteristic of Cubism together with the naturalistic forms more common to academic art, his works represent a peculiar blend of the academic and the avant garde.
Huroufiyah
Authors: Shabout Nada
Published: September 2018

The perception of the Arabic letter in art has gone through many changes from the Islamic civilization to the modern age. Following the political and socio-cultural changes of the 19th and 20th century, the Arabic script lost its sacredness. After decades of limited existence in traditional craft, the Arabic letter reappeared in modern Arab art around the middle of the 20th century on nationalistic bases. The Arabic language had acquired a high value during the age of colonialism as a symbol of national identity, a unifier; this value only grew stronger with time. The letter was also a signifier that aided twentieth-century Arab artists in their artistic identity crisis. A number of art groups—such as the Baghdad Group of Modern Art, formed in 1951—were established with their focus on a search for a local or national art style through ‘istilham al-turath,’ seeking inspiration from tradition. The Arabic letter became the means for connecting artists’ present with their past and allowing for the invention of tradition. Huroufiyah (Arabic for Letterism), a highly contested term initiated by a newspaper journalist, became a term popularly used to signify all experiments with the Arabic letter in the modern Arab art. Nevertheless, the term is surrounded by controversy in the contemporary Arab world and rejected by a number of scholars and artists. The term al-Madrassa al-Khattiya Fil-Fann (Calligraphic School of Art), has been alternatively proposed, expressing specifically a perceived continuation with Islamic calligraphy.
Suro, Darío (1918–1997)
Authors: Estevez Lisandra
Published: September 2018

One of the Dominican Republic’s foremost modern painters, Darío Suro’s heterodox style of painting encompassed a wide range of styles from the impressionist mood of his early paintings, to the neo-realism of his maturity, and finally to the abstraction of his later works. Like his contemporaries Yoryi Morel and Jaime Colson, Suro was concerned with portraying themes that expressed his Dominican identity and sought to create an authentic language for painting. His early landscapes of horses and rainy scenes such as Lluvia en el Mercado (Rain in the Market, 1942, Museo Bellapart) captured the shifting effects of light on colour in the tropical landscape of the Cibao region where he was raised.
Monnier, Adrienne (1892–1955)
Authors: Mitrano Mena
Published: September 2018

Adrienne Monnier was a gifted writer, editor, bookseller, publisher, patron, and salon keeper based in Paris. For the first half of the twentieth century, Monnier was at the centre of an international intellectual network, a sought-after hostess who welcomed to her home and table many American friends of her companion, Sylvia Beach.

Her bookstore, La Maison des Amis de Livres, was located at 7 rue de l’Odeon. It was made possible by the indemnity money that Monnier’s father got from a train accident. Initially, it served as a lending library and specialized in modern authors, with a section on the ‘entire world’ and another on Tibet and Tibetan yoga. Her love of books turned the place from an anonymous bookstore to, as France Soir put it in 1953, ‘un espáce de célebrité’. Monnier organized readings called ‘Les Séance des Amis des Livre’ and held Wednesday gatherings devoted to lectures and presentations. In her bookstore Valery Larbaud lectured on James Joyce for the first time on December 7, 1921. An untiring cultural entrepreneur, she also edited and published her own review, Le Navire d’Argent.
Late Modernism
Authors: Trub Simon D.
Published: September 2018

Late Modernism is a critics’ term rather than one that artists used themselves. Introducing it in the late 1970s, architectural critic Charles Jencks was probably the first to use ‘Late Modernism’ systematically. In addition to architectural scholarship, the term can be found in art criticism and musicology, but it is most firmly established in the field of literary studies. Late Modernism, like Modernism, can refer to a literary period, style, or genre and is exceedingly difficult to pinpoint. Accordingly, various literary critics use ‘Late Modernism’ to refer to different time periods or sets of writers from roughly the 1930s up to the present. Invariably, however, Late Modernism describes literature that continues characteristics associated with Modernism beyond the culmination of high Modernism. Hence, Late Modernism exists at a distance to the modernisms of the 1910s and 1920s. It marks a point at which modernist artists become self-consciously modernist, or at which modernist aesthetics become less effective or more difficult to continue.