bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Arlt, Roberto (1900-1942)
Authors: Padilla Javier , Fonseca Pacheco Fernando
Published: September 2018

Roberto Arlt was an Argentine novelist, playwright, journalist, travel writer, and short-story writer. Recognized in recent decades as a foundational figure of modern literature in Argentina and Latin America, during his lifetime he was regarded as an outsider among writers. Arlt began to acquire a prominent status in Latin American literature in the 1960s, thanks to several young writers and critics who noted a significant precedent in his confrontational prose, as well as for his transgressive treatment of the power dynamics and cultural issues associated with the rise of modern urban societies.
Zweig, Stefan (1881–1942)
Authors: Rock Lene
Published: September 2018

Stefan Zweig was a prominent Austrian-Jewish novelist, playwright and journalist throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Growing up in a Viennese upper-class environment of assimilated Jewry, which attached great importance to the Bildung genre, Zweig devoted himself to literature from a young age. As a student of literature and philosophy at the universities of Vienna and Berlin, he moved in bohemian circles, focusing on his writing. At the age of 19, he published SilberneSaiten [Silver Strings] (1901), a selection of poems initiating his literary success. Theodor Herzl, founder of Zionism and then literary editor of the Viennese newspaper NeuefreiePresse, published some of Zweig’s early essays.

A defender of humanism and internationalism, Zweig himself was not attracted to the Jewish nationalist cause. Zweig did not, however, renounce his roots, and he would occasionally incorporate Jewish themes into stories such as ImSchnee [In the Snow] (1901). Zweig has been recognized, in particular, for his novellas. His most notable novellas include Schachnovelle [The Royal Game] (1942) and Der Amokläufer [Amok] (1922); historical miniatures such as Sternstunden der Menschheit [Decisive Moments in History] (1927); and novelistic biographies of figures like Erasmus, Magellan, Joseph Fouché, Marie Antoinette, and Napoleon. Zweig’s works are characterized by a careful construction of psychological veracity, illustrating the often tragic evolution of powerful emotions into an overall sense of resignation.
Choukri, Mohamed (1935–2003)
Authors: Rius-Piniés Mònica
Published: September 2018

Mohamed Choukri (Muḥammad Shukrī) was a Moroccan writer who made an important contribution to the renewal of literature in the Arabic world. Internationally, he is one of the best-known Arab writers, mainly due to his relationship with Paul Bowles, who was his mentor and translator into English. Choukri introduced major changes in Arabic literature, in terms of both the topics selected and the language used, combining classical Arabic with the Moroccan dialect. His main literary corpus is autobiographical and draws on his inspirational life: born in truly miserable conditions, he managed to educate himself and obtain a university degree before becoming a teacher and writer. The first volume of his memoirs, For Bread Alone, is one of the most widely read books in Arabic, and was adapted for the cinema.
Crawley, Alan (1887–1975)
Authors: Lang Anouk
Published: September 2018

Alan Crawley (born in Cobourg, Ontario on 23 August 1887; died on Vancouver Island in 1975) was an editor and critic who played a significant role in the development of modernist Canadian poetry in the 1940s and 1950s. A lawyer by training, he was rendered blind in his forties, and his enforced retirement left him the time to pursue his interest in modern poetry. In 1941 he was approached by four west coast poets, Dorothy Livesay, Floris McLaren, Doris Ferne and Anne Marriott, to edit a magazine that they felt was sorely needed as a vehicle for contemporary Canadian poetry. The resulting periodical, Contemporary Verse, ran from September 1941 to 1953, publishing over 120 poets during its 39-issue run. Contemporary Verse, which Crawley edited first from Vancouver and later from Victoria, proved an important forum for both emerging and established Canadian poets. Crawley took pains to encourage younger poets, especially women, and sent constructive critiques and perceptive comments both to those whose contributions he accepted and to those he rejected. In addition to his editorial duties, Crawley also did occasional public outreach activities such as radio broadcasts, poetry readings and speaking tours, which he used to introduce Canadians to contemporary poetry from both their own nation and from abroad.
The 1914 Generation Artists
Authors: Shaw Wendy
Published: September 2018

The artists historiographically grouped as the 1914 Generation transformed the Westernizing artistic impulse of the late Ottoman era into the modernizing impulse of the Republic of Turkey, founded in 1923. Stylistically, the 1914 Generation distinguishes itself from earlier generations through its interest in naturalism, and from later generations through its disinterest in aesthetic modernism. More than functioning as a cohesive movement, the 1914 Generation came to prominence as a result of the onset of World War I. The artists most often included within this categorization include: Nazmi Ziya Güran (1881–1937), Mehmet Ruhi Arel (1880–1931), İbrahim Çallı (1882–1960), Hikmet Onat (1882–1977), Feyhaman Duran (1886–1970), Hüseyin Avni Lifij (1886–1927), and Namık İsmail (1890–1935). Although often excluded because of their lack of affiliation with the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts, artists who may be considered in conjunction with this category by virtue of their participation in the pivotal transition from Ottoman to Turkish national identity also include Şevket (Dağ; 1876–1948), a teacher at the French-language Galatasaray Lycée, the military-trained artists Mehmet Sami Yetik (1878–1935), Mehmet Ali Laga (1878–1947) and Ali Sami Boyar (1880–1967), as well as the female artist Mihri Rasim/Müşfik (1886–1954).
Darío, Rubén (1867-1916)
Authors: McGinn Emily
Published: September 2018

Born Félix Rubén García Sarmiento in Metapa, Nicaragua in 1867, Rubén Darío is largely considered the father of ‘modernismo’ in Latin America. This poet, essayist and journalist travelled widely across the Americas and Europe and was a key figure in articulating a new Latin American voice on the world literary stage. Darío’s work in unifying the disparate threads of a pan-American literature was crucial in the development of modernismo, and the resultant vanguard literary forms on the continent.
Das, Jibanananda (1899-1954)
Authors: Bandyopadhyay Sibaji
Published: September 2018

Jibanananda Das was one of the pre-eminent Bengali poets of the first half of the twentieth century. With the posthumous entry of his prose writings into the public domain, it is now generally accepted that Jibanananda was also a storyteller and novelist of the first rank.

Jibanananda was born in the district town of Barishal (now in Bangladesh) in a Brahma household. After obtaining an MA in English from Calcutta University in 1921, he taught in various colleges.
Literary Modernism in Finland
Authors: Ameel Lieven
Published: September 2018

Literary modernism in Finland falls into a set of distinctive sub-movements, defined, in part, by the two languages in which Finnish literature is expressed: Finnish and Swedish. Early modernist features appear in turn-of-the-century impressionist and national-romantic (or symbolist) literature, as well as in the work of authors associated with the 1910s Finland-Swedish dagdrivare (‘idlers’), and in that of two movements of the interwar period: the 1920s tulenkantajat (‘Torchbearers’) and the 1930s Kiila (‘Wedge’) movements. Full modernism was achieved in the Finland-Swedish modernism of the 1910s and 1920s, in the work of the poet Edith Södergran, the critic and author Hagar Olsson, the writer and composer Elmer Diktonius, the poet Gunnar Björling, and others. In literature in Finnish, the modernist breakthrough took place as late as the 1950s. Key figures were the editor, theorist and poet Thomas Anhava, the poet Paavo Haavikko, and the authors Eeva-Liisa Manner, Marja-Liisa Vartio and Veijo Meri.
Aestheticism
Authors: Ingelbien Raphaël
Published: September 2018

Aestheticism refers to a late-Victorian tendency to argue that art is its own justification and should therefore be judged by purely aesthetic criteria. Closely related to the doctrine of l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake) put forward by Théophile Gautier and to the radical aesthetic theories of Charles Baudelaire, British aestheticism found its leading exponent in Walter Pater. His work had an immediate and profound impact on writers and artists like Oscar Wilde, who are sometimes referred to as aesthetes, and more often as decadents, and his lasting influence has been traced in the work of several major modernist writers.

As a category of English literary history, the term "aestheticism" is a relatively recent scholarly construction. However, contemporaries used words like "aesthetes" and "aesthetic" to designate the late-Victorian phenomenon. The Greek word α ἰ σθητικός refers to "that which is perceptible by the senses;" in modern European thought, aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that analyses the ways in which artworks produce sensations in spectators and, more broadly, the nature and role of art.
Debord, Guy (1931–1994)
Authors: Mitchell Ryan Robert
Published: September 2018

Guy Ernest Debord (1931–1994) was a French radical political theorist, writer, activist and filmmaker. After his early involvement with French avant-garde art movements in the 1950s, Debord founded a revolutionary organization, the Situationist International (SI), in 1957. Inspired by earlier avant-garde movements like Dada and surrealism, Debord sought to create an explicitly political and critical art practice that could be employed to transform everyday life. The SI attracted sound poets, architects, writers, activists, graphic artists and painters. The movement sought to merge everyday life, art and politics through such practices as radical city planning, the beautification of the city through graffiti, and rambling psycho-geographic drifts through urban spaces, seeking to uncover the desire and beauty that had been hidden by advanced capitalism.
Hall, Radclyffe (1880–1943)
Authors: Gunn Julian
Published: September 2018

Radclyffe Hall was a British novelist, poet, and lyricist. A contemporary of the Bloomsbury Group and proponent of Havelock Ellis's sexological theories, Hall is best known for the ground-breaking novel of sexual inversion, The Well of Loneliness (1928). The novel was the center of a landmark obscenity trial, and has continued to attract controversy. Its depiction of inversion has been both lauded and criticized by feminist, queer, and trans theorists.

Hall was born Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe-Hall on August 12, 1880 to wealthy parents who divorced in 1883. She briefly attended King's College London and spent a year studying in Germany. In 1912 Hall converted to Catholicism with her partner at the time, the singer Mabel Batten. At Batten’s request, Hall did not serve in the women’s ambulance corps during the Great War (Baker). However, a number of Hall’s fictional characters find autonomy and sexual identity through their war service.
Isherwood, Christopher (1904–1986)
Authors: Gunn Julian
Published: September 2018

Christopher Isherwood was a British American novelist, memoirist, and playwright best known for The Berlin Diaries, a fictionalized portrayal of his experiences with the urban demimonde and the rise of Nazism in pre-Second World War Berlin. A close friend of W. H. Auden and other modernist writers, Isherwood used modernist aesthetic technique to present the destructive effects of Fascism on the ethical behavior of ordinary Germans (Spiro: 17). Isherwood's work had considerable influence on British and, after his move in 1939 to Los Angeles, American literature.
Berlewi, Henryk (1894–1967)
Authors: Głuchowska Lidia
Published: September 2018

The Polish painter, graphic designer and art critic Henryk Berlewi was one of the outstanding figures of Polish Constructivism and the Yiddish Avant-Garde. As a theoretician and innovator of functional typography he became a precursor of Op Art and Minimal Art.
Bharati, Dharamvir (1926–1997)
Authors: Pandey Rakesh
Published: September 2018

Dharamvir Bharati was one of the most versatile literary figures of modern Hindi Literature in independent India. Born on 25 December, 1926 in a Kayastha family in Allahabad in North India, Bharati grew up witnessing one of the most creative phases in the field of politics, education and literature during late colonial era of which the city was a central node. Bharati majored in Hindi literature at the University of Allahabad (gaining an MA in 1946 and a Ph.D in 1954) and devoted himself to researching mediaeval literary traditions of the Siddhas, a Buddhist Vajrayan sect. He later joined the same university as a lecturer before moving to Bombay in 1960 as the editor of the Hindi weekly Dharmayug, a position which he held until 1987.

Bharati’s wider literary reputation rings the name of the play Andha Yug (1954), based on the episodes of the Mahabharata, and two novels, Gunahon Ka Devata (1949) and Suraj Ka Satwan Ghoda (1952), capturing the themes of his city’s social life. Later Bharati earned a unique reputation as a writer-editor who nurtured a new style of journalistic writing in Hindi.
Boyle, Kay (1902–1992)
Authors: Randall Bryony
Published: September 2018

Kay Boyle was a novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist and political activist. Born in St Paul, Minnesota, she married a Frenchman, Richard Brault, in 1922 and moved to France with him the following year. She then lived in Europe for most of the next twenty years, and her early novels frequently reflect her own experiences as an expatriate. Languid and impressionistic in style, her early prose work focuses on relationships between men and women. In later life she also became heavily involved in politics and her work took on a more urgent social tenor; for example, the 1936 novel Death of a Man alerted readers to the threat of Nazism.
Broch, Hermann (1886–1951)
Authors: Dowden Stephen D.
Published: September 2018

Hermann Broch is best known as a philosophically attuned novelist. Above all he is the author of two extraordinarily accomplished works of European modernist fiction: Die Schlafwandler (The Sleepwalkers) (1932) and Der Tod des Vergil (The Death of Virgil) (1945). After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Broch focused on charismatic politics, perverted religious feeling, and the contagious madness of crowds in a new novel. It concerns a wandering demagogue who seduces and corrupts the peasants of a Tyrolean village. Broch never felt satisfied with the book and did not complete or publish any of its three versions. The most fully developed of the three was published posthumously in 1953 as Die Verzauberung (The Spell). Broch’s failure to complete this book was predicated on his sense of literature’s impotence in the face of political violence. He turned to activism, writing anti-fascist tracts and developing his League of Nations Resolution (1936/37), which pressured that organization to take a stand against European fascism. When the Nazis annexed Austria, Broch fell into the hands of the Gestapo: as a converted Jew he was especially vulnerable. With the support of James Joyce and others, he escaped Nazi Austria in 1938.
DYN (1942–1945)
Authors: Winter Amy
Published: September 2018

In Mexico City, at the height of World War II, the Viennese expatriate artist Wolfgang Paalen founded and edited DYN, an international art journal that distinguished him as a theorist and scholar of modern and ethnographic art. The journal was instrumental in the development of avant-garde art in Mexico and New York, particularly Abstract Expressionism. In DYN, Paalen published his own essays, criticism, and poetry, and collections of Native American Art, along with the contributions of Latin American artists such as Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Miguel Covarrubias, César Moro, Carlos Mérida, Martín Chambi, and Roberto Matta; European artists Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Gordon Onslow Ford, and Alice Rahon; New York artists Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, David Smith, and William Baziotes; Mexican anthropologists and ethnologists Alfonso Caso, Miguel Angel Fernandez, and Carlos Margain Araujo; and writers Valentine Penrose, Henry Miller, and Anaïs Nin. The five issues of DYN published between 1942 and 1944 inspired artists and thinkers worldwide. In 1945, following Paalen’s one-man exhibitions in Mexico City and New York, Robert Motherwell edited Form and Sense, an anthology of the DYN essays.
Horkheimer, Max (1895–1973)
Authors: Edgar Andrew
Published: September 2018

Born near Stuttgart, Germany, the philosopher Max Horkheimer, who obtained his doctorate from the University of Frankfurt, is best known as a leader of the Frankfurt School, along with Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas. From 1930 to 1958 (with a significant hiatus from 1934 to 1948), Horkheimer served as the Director of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Frankfurt Institute for Social Research), founded in 1923 to promote multidisciplinary research in the social sciences with a particular focus on Marxian thought; along with his colleague Adorno, Horkheimer was responsible for developing the distinctive form of Marxist philosophy that framed this research through the methodologies of German critical theory. Instead of just describing social systems through "objective" means, critical theory would endeavor to uncover the social context and raise questions about truth and social justice, acknowledging also that critical theory cannot produce universal truths. At best, the critical theorist simply expresses the contradictions and falsehoods of the society within which they work. Critical theory was applied in a sweeping analysis of Western civilization in Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947; Dialectic of Enlightenment), in which Adorno and Horkheimer argued that the progress of enlightened Western culture was simultaneously a regression into a new barbarism and an entanglement in myth. In modernist art, such as the work of James Joyce and Pablo Picasso, Horkheimer identified a crucial source of resistance to the political and economic oppression of late capitalist society. Horkheimer, who was Jewish, escaped Nazi Germany and taught at Columbia University from 1935 to 1941; he lived in Los Angeles during the 1940s, but eventually returned to Germany where died in Nuremburg in 1973.
Jayyusi, Salma Khadra (1926–)
Authors: Irving Sarah
Published: September 2018

Salma Khadra Jayyusi is an anthologist, translator, literary critic, and poet of Palestinian origins. A writer and researcher in her own right, she is better known for spearheading major projects aimed at introducing Arabic culture, literature, and history to Western audiences. Via the Project of Translation from Arabic (PROTA) and East–West Nexus programs, she has contributed to and helped to translate and edit dozens of novels, edited collections and anthologies of Arabic poetry, short stories, novellas, and scholarly articles.
The Lindsay Family (1870–1958)
Authors: Peers Juliette
Published: September 2018

The Lindsays were a multigenerational family of artists, designers, curators, and authors in Australia. The originating generation, who made the most quantifiable contribution to modern Australian art, was made up of five brothers and one sister (three other sisters and a brother did not work professionally as artists), born and raised in Creswick, Victoria. Four of the siblings trained at the National Gallery School in Melbourne and although most of the family traveled overseas to paint and exhibit, with the exception of Norman’s sons Jack and Phillip who stayed in Britain, their art and reputations were confined to Australia. Of the second generation, which included a number of artists and writers, a novelist, an art historian, and a cultural commentator, Jack Lindsay had the most impact. Like the Boyd family, there was an element of unquestioned and shared talent among the siblings and their descendants. However, the family’s singularity was assiduously hyperbolized in the public eye by its members’ charismatic public performances. It was also fabricated by a heightened consciousness of the merits of family inheritance, married to a skillful awareness of an emerging media culture, deployed with an eye on posterity.
Ottoman Painter’s Society
Authors: Shaw Wendy
Published: September 2018

Established in 1909, the Society of Ottoman Artists (Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti) was the first professional organization of artists in the Ottoman Empire. Initiated by the artist Mehmet Ruhi Arel and financed by Prince Abdülmecid, it aimed to integrate artistic production and consumption into the modern society envisioned after the Second Constitutional Revolution. By including practitioners of traditional book arts in addition to artists working in Western modes of painting and sculpture, it reflected an integrated vision of modern local cultural production. It disseminated technical and historical information about the arts in the Ottoman and European traditions through its Journal of the Society of Ottoman Artists. After its dissolution in 1919 due to the instability of the Ottoman Empire, similar organixations were established including the Society of Turkish Painters (Türk Ressamlar Cemiyeti, 1921), the Union of Turkish Fine Arts (Türk Sanayii Nefise Birliği, 1926), and the Güzel Sanatlar Birliği (1929). Following nearly a century of reforms, which implemented a mode of modernization modeled after Europe, the Second Constitutional Revolution of 1909 realized a long-standing dream among many progressives to establish a constitutional monarchy. It followed the long reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876–1909), who had used the war with Russia in 1877 to foil the first constitutional revolution, following his ascension to power after a coup against Sultan Abdulaziz the previous year.
Young Vietnamese Artists Association [Hội Họa Sĩ Trẻ Việt Nam]
Authors: Tran Thuy N. D.
Published: September 2018

The Young Vietnamese Artists Association (YVAA; 1966–75) was an avant-garde artist collective founded in Saigon in November 1966 in the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam; 1954–75). Also referred to as the Society of Saigonese Young Artists, the majority of its members were under the age of thirty and were recent graduates of the National College of Fine Arts, Saigon (est. 1954) and the Fine Arts College of Hue (est. 1957). The YVAA’s mission was to foster a new direction for visual art in Vietnam that would better reflect the cultural internationalism and modernization of the era. While YVAA artists experimented with a variety of artistic styles, abstract works influenced by the modernist styles found in the School of Paris—including Lyrical Abstraction, Cubism, Fauvism, and Naive Art—were prevalent.

Initiated by art collector Dr Nguyễn Tấn Hồng and artist Ngy Cao Uyên (YVAA’s founding president), the Association’s founding members were mainly painters and sculptors: Vị Ý, Cù Nguyễn, Âu Như Thụy, Nguyễn Trung, Trịnh Cung, Nguyên Khai, Hiếu Đệ, Nguyễn Phước, Mai Chửng, Đinh Cường, Nghiêu Đề, Nguyễn Lâm, Hồ Hữu Thủ, and Hồ Thành Đức. With frequent sponsorships from the Goethe Institut and the Alliance Française, the YVAA became a driving force behind Saigon’s arts scene.
Shammas, Anton (1950–)
Authors: Irving Sarah
Published: September 2018

Anton Shammas is a Palestinian poet, novelist, academic and translator. He is best known for his 1986 novel ערבסקות/Arabeskot [Arabesques], the first high-profile novel written by a Palestinian in the Hebrew language. Shammas' literary career—as a writer, translator, and scholar—has largely focused on themes of Palestinian and Israeli identity, and the relationship of such identities to language and translation.
Fei Ming (废名) 1901–1967
Authors: Tang Yan (Amy)
Published: September 2018

Fei Ming was an important contributor to Chinese modern literature between the 1920s and 1940s. He was born in 1901 to a wealthy and traditional family in Huang Mei county, Hu Bei Province, mainland China. He received Chinese traditional education in si shu (私塾, a private school), studying四书五经 (The Four Books and Five Classics) and other Confucian classics. In 1922 he entered Peking University and began to write poetry and fiction. Two years later he was transferred to the university’s department of English, where he studied British literature. Meanwhile, he became a member of语丝社 (Yu Si She), a literary group founded in 1924 by Lu Xun (鲁迅; original name Zhou Shuren, 周树人) and Zhou Zuoren (周作人, the younger brother of Lu Xun) to produce Chinese modern literary works for their journals—《语丝》(Yu Si) and《耕耘 (Geng Yun). In 1925 Fei Ming published his first short story collection《竹林的故事》 [The Stories of the Bamboo Grove]. Between 1925 and 1932, he published his first long novel 《桥》[Bridge] in serial form in《语丝》. Between 1928 – 1932 he published two short story collections《桃园》 and《枣》, and two long novels,《桥》[Bridge] and 《莫须有先生传》.
Tagore, Rabindranath (1861–1940)
Authors: Kumar Siva
Published: September 2018

Rabindranath Tagore is India’s pre-eminent writer and was the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1913. He is best known for his poetry collection Gitanjali: Song Offerings, which he self-translated into English from Bengali. Tagore introduced new verse forms into Bengali poetry, and revolutionized literary prose by using colloquial Bengali (calit bhasa) in his novels and short stories. Previously, Bengali literature had been written in refined Bengali (sadhu bhasa), which drew on Sanskritic vocabulary and archaic grammatical forms. Tagore was a strong advocate of caste reform in colonial India, a critic of nationalisms worldwide, and the founder of an international university called Visva-Bharati whose motto was Yatra visvam bhavatieka nidam (‘Where the whole world meets in one nest’).

Rabindranath Tagore was born on 7 May 7 1861 to Debendranath and his wife Sarada Devi. The surname Tagore is an Anglicization of ‘Thakur’, which means lord in Bengali. His father was an influential member of the Brahmo Samaj, a religious society dedicated to reforming Hinduism. Brahmoism’s tenets of caste and marriage reform can be seen in the development of Tagore’s short stories and novels from Chokher Bali [Grain of Sand] in 1903 to Char Adhyay [Four Chapters] in 1934.
Unamuno y Jugo, Miguel de (1864–1936)
Authors: Vandenbosch Dagmar
Published: September 2018

Miguel de Unamuno is a Spanish writer and philosopher whose work includes essays, novels, poetry, drama, and journalism. He is considered to be one of the leading members of the Generation of 1898, a group of canonical writers championing the political and cultural regeneration of Spain in the early twentieth century. Recurrent themes in his oeuvre are the struggle between reason and faith, the question of mortality, and the search for identity (of both individuals and nations). His narrative oeuvre breaks away from the model of nineteenth-century realism by focusing on the inner life of the protagonist and introducing metafictional devices.

Born in the Basque city of Bilbao, Unamuno studied at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy of the University of Madrid. In 1891, he obtained the chair of Greek Philology at the University of Salamanca, of which he was appointed rector ten years later. In 1924 Unamuno was banished for six years due to his opposition to the dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera. On his return to Spain in 1930, he welcomed the Second Republic but soon was disappointed by it. After the outbreak of the Civil War, he first supported the Francoist rebellion but ended up condemning it publicly shortly before his death in 1936.
Waddington, Miriam (née Dworkin) (1917–2004)
Authors: Hall Molly
Published: September 2018

Canadian poet Miriam Waddington was born in Winnipeg’s Jewish North End neighbourhood in Manitoba, Canada on 23 December 1917. Waddington was honoured with several awards for her writing throughout her career, winning the Borestone Mountain Award for best poem of the year in 1963, 1966, and 1974, and the J. J. Segal Award in 1972; receiving honorary doctorates from Lakehead University in 1975 and York University in 1985; and having her words imprinted on the Canadian $100 note in 2004. Her socialist and Yiddish upbringing inflected the politics of her poetry throughout her life; it was through her parents’ connections that she was able to receive mentorship from respected Yiddish poet Ida Maze, whose influences can be seen in Waddington’s work. Her translations of Yiddish poets were also central to her own poetic practice. Her style was unique for its formal precision in combination with a conversational tone—an innovation of stylistic play uncommon before her time. Her poetic focus on female-lived experience, preoccupation with her Jewish roots, and her Canadian nationality were deftly interwoven with explorations of cultural, national, and personal identity.
Escudero, Vicente (1892–1980)
Authors: Bennahum Ninotchka Devorah
Published: September 2018

Vicente Escudero was a multitalented artist. There is no question that the great bailaor Antonio el de Bilbao, whom he met on a tour of Andalusia and Portugal, had a lasting influence on Escudero, as did the modernist dance-theater of La Argentina, the Ballets Russes, and the visual art revolution. He even became a close friend of the modern master Pablo Picasso. Between 1920 and his debut as a concert dancer in 1927, Escudero honed his craft and his choreography, learning to dance longer works in the cafés cantantes of Madrid. Escudero was particularly known for his famous Farruca solo, and for his performances with Carmita Garcia, who would become his lifelong stage partner. Dancing on a concert stage, Escudero was received by critics like André Levinson, who wrote seriously about his work as a dancer and a choreographer.
One Step
Authors: Cook Susan C.
Published: September 2018

In the years before the entry of the United States into World War I, the One Step replaced the Two Step as the common popular dance. As the name suggests, it signaled a new relationship between dance step and musical meter. Whereas the Two Step, popular since the 1890s, consisted of a skipping step to music in 6/8 meter, the One Step featured a step, glide, or trot on each beat of duple-meter music marked by the syncopated and dotted rhythms long associated with African American musical practices. African American composer and bandleader James Reese Europe similarly proclaimed the One Step "the national dance of the negro."
Uthoff, Ernst (1904–1993)
Authors: Norton Sydney Jane
Published: September 2018

Ernst Uthoff was a German-born dancer, choreographer, and company director who received his dance training from two pioneers of Tanztheater (dance-theater): Kurt Jooss and Sigurd Leeder. He was one of the original members of the Folkwang-Tanzbühne (Folkwang Dance Stage), a company that Jooss and Leeder co-founded in 1927, and Uthoff created and performed several important roles for Jooss. As a performer he is best known for his roles of the Standard Bearer in The Green Table (1932) and the Libertine in Big City (1932). In 1934 Uthoff fled Nazi Germany together with his wife, the Hungarian dancer Lola Botka, Jooss, and other company members. The troupe settled at Dartington Hall in England, where its dancers opened a Jooss–Leeder school and performed under the name Ballets Jooss. Ballets Jooss toured South America in 1941, during which time the Chilean government invited Uthoff, Botka, and solo dancer Rudolf Pescht to remain in Chile to establish a school of contemporary dance. The three settled in Santiago that same year, co-founding the Escuela de Danzas (School of Dance). Soon after, Uthoff, Botka, and Pescht established the Ballet Nacional Chileno (National Ballet of Chile), a state-financed company based at the University of Chile in Santiago. Ballet Nacional Chileno was one of Chile’s first nationally sponsored professional dance companies, and it is still flourishing today.
al-`Ayni, Yusuf (1927–)
Authors: Al-Shamma James
Published: September 2018

A playwright, actor, and director, Yusuf al-`Ayni was instrumental in the development of Iraqi theater from the 1950s through the 1970s. His three-decades-long career coincides with the advent and flourishing of a professional theater in Iraq, one primarily concerned with addressing political and social concerns. He emerged during a time of political turmoil under the British-supported monarchy and his tenure coincided with the establishment of the independent Iraqi state in 1958 and later the rise of the Baathists and Saddam Hussein. In the late 1960s, al-`Ayni initiated the movement within Iraq that combined classical Arabic forms with techniques from Western political theater, particularly those of Bertolt Brecht.
Lynching Drama
Authors: Stephens-Lorenz Judith
Published: September 2018

Lynching dramas reflect the brutal history of racial violence in which black individuals, primarily black men, were murdered by a white mob with no repercussions for the murderers. This is the particular form of lynching that became a systematic feature of black–white race relations in the United States after 1865 (when slavery was outlawed in the US Constitution) and that lynching dramas address. References to lynching appear in African American drama as early as 1858 (The Escape; or a Leap for Freedom by William Wells Brown), but lynching drama developed as a form when playwrights (both black and white) moved beyond brief references and focussed on a specific lynching incident (Granny Maumee by Ridgely Torrence, 1914).
Ryan, Oscar (1904–1989)
Authors: Filewod Alan
Published: September 2018

The leading cultural activist in the Canadian Communist Party in the 1930s, Oscar Ryan was the formative figure in the Workers’ Theatre movement in Canada and a tireless advocate of revolutionary theatrical modernism. Born Oscar Weinstein, he took his underground name from his mother’s maiden name, Rein. He grew up in Montreal and Winnipeg and after high school joined the Young Communist League as a full-time party activist. With an idiomatic and forceful proletarian writing style in the manner of John Dos Passos and Mike Gold, he became a writer for the Communist Party’s Daily Worker and its successors, the Daily Clarion and the Canadian Tribune. As Martin Stone, he was a theater critic for the Tribune from 1955 to 1988. In the Communist Party of Canada, he was an early supporter of Tim Buck, who took over the party in 1929 when communist parties around the world assumed a more radical militant stance in answer to Stalin’s call for revolutionary class war. Under Buck, Ryan became a leading figure in the party’s propaganda wing, a cultural organizer, publicity director of the Canadian Labour Defence League, and the author of numerous pamphlets.
The Pioneer Players (1911–25)
Authors: Cockin Katharine M.
Published: September 2018

Led by director Edith Craig, with her mother Ellen Terry as president, the Pioneer Players theater society was founded on May 11, 1911 in London with the aim of staging the play of ideas. As a play-producing subscription society following the model of the much larger Stage Society and earlier New Century and Independent Theatre societies, the Pioneer Players’ innovative productions of controversial drama for its members were deemed to be private and thereby technically evaded the Lord Chamberlain’s licensing powers.
The Provincetown Players (1915–1922)
Authors: Black Cheryl
Published: September 2018

Founded in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1915 and transplanted to Greenwich Village in 1916, the Provincetown Players was one of the most influential theatrical organizations in American theater history. Their membership was a veritable who’s who of the era’s leading political and cultural revolutionaries, including its spiritus rector, socialist writer George Cram (Jig) Cook; postimpressionist artists William and Marguerite Zorach and Bror Nordfeldt; labor journalists John Reed and Mary Heaton Vorse; modernist poets Wallace Stevens, Alfred Kreymborg, Mina Loy, and Edna St Vincent Millay; New Stagecraft pioneers Robert Edmond Jones and Cleon Throckmorton; and more than fifty playwrights whose dramaturgical innovations defied contemporary critical description.

In addition to formal experimentation, Provincetown playwrights were noted for their frank treatment of such topical issues as racial, ethnic, and religious Otherness, class conflict, war, and changing gender and sexual mores. Their plays manifested the most current trends in the era’s intellectual discourse: Freudian and Jungian psychology; Nietzschean challenges to traditional morality; Havelock Ellis’s and Ellen Keys’ ideas on egalitarian sexual and marital relationships; the social theories of Karl Marx and Edward Carpenter; the feminism of Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, and Crystal Eastman; and the parenting techniques of Maria Montessori.
Welles, Orson (1915–1985)
Authors: Miguel García-Mainar Luis
Published: September 2018

Orson Welles was born on May 6, 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to Richard Head Welles, a prosperous wagon manufacturer and inventor, and Beatrice Ives Welles, a gifted concert pianist. Noted for a deep resonant voice, imposing personality, and overflowing talent, he was an actor, director, writer, and producer in theater, radio, and film. Welles succeeded in innovating in all those fields but left his mark mostly on cinema with a series of stylistically original films. His Citizen Kane recounted the life of newspaper mogul Charles Foster Kane, fashioned after media magnate William Randolph Hearst, from five different points of view. Made for RKO in 1941, it has been placed at the top of "Best Films" lists by critics and specialized magazines ever since. Citizen Kane was followed by The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), a story about declining family fortunes and the rise of the automobile that echoed his own life. Welles’s films were praised for their ingenious techniques—long takes and compositions in depth that reinforced realism and gave spectators the freedom to scan the scene in ways that classical editing did not allow, while also producing a stylized, unnatural cinema (Bazin 2005; 1991: 64–82; Naremore 1989: 35).
Federal Art Project
Authors: Pocock Antonia
Published: September 2018

The Federal Art Project (FAP) was a branch of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a work relief agency established in 1935 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Second New Deal. Aimed at mitigating unemployment during the Great Depression, the WPA hired 8.5 million Americans for public works projects, focused mainly on infrastructure improvements. The WPA’s Federal Project Number One—which comprised the FAP, the Federal Writers’ Project, Federal Theater Project, Federal Music Project, and Historical Records Survey—subsidized the creative activities of 40,000 artists, writers, actors, and musicians. The FAP commissioned 5,000 visual artists to paint murals in public buildings; create easel paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings that were displayed in traveling exhibitions; teach in newly established Community Art Centers; document the activities of the WPA photographically; and design posters promoting New Deal policies. In addition to providing financial aid to destitute artists, the FAP aimed to preserve their skills and encourage a thriving American artistic tradition at a time when there were few private commissions. Though it operated nationwide, the FAP was concentrated in New York City, where 3,000 artists participated in the project, including many who went on to achieve international recognition after World War II as part of the Abstract Expressionist movement. By 1941, the FAP was limited to the production of war propaganda and training aids, and in 1943, President Roosevelt terminated all WPA projects.
Yu, Hyun-mok (1925–2009)
Authors: Cook Ryan
Published: September 2018

Yu Hyun-mok belonged to the first generation of postliberation filmmakers in South Korea, and is known for films inspired by Italian neorealism that unsparingly depicted postwar social problems. His 1961 film Obalt’an (Aimless Bullet) is regarded as one of the great Korean films of the era. The film was made during a brief relaxation of censorship following the April Revolution and the resignation of President Syngman Rhee in 1960. Allegorizing Korean society, it portrays a frustrated patriarch whose meager salary cannot support his dysfunctional family. It famously makes the protagonist’s decaying tooth a metaphor for festering social ills.
Epstein, Jean (1897–1953)
Authors: Patrick Pringle Thomas
Published: September 2018

Born in Warsaw in 1897 to a Jewish Franco-Polish family, Jean Epstein was an early queer filmmaker, poet, and theorist. Epstein is best remembered for the innovative camerawork and editing techniques in his interpretation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (La Chute de la Maison Usher, 1928). Epstein’s engagement with cinematic form ranged from rhythm-based impressionist editing in Coeur fidéle (The Faithful Heart, 1923), to experimental sound work in Le Tempestaire (The Storm Master, 1947), and his writings on the concept of photogénie. Epstein’s theoretical reflections on the interwar period dovetailed with film criticism’s shift toward ontology and attention to the transformative effects of the moving image on perception and knowledge.

Epstein spent his formative years in Switzerland before moving to France in 1917 to study medicine. His interests soon turned toward cinema following contact with Louis and Auguste Lumière. Epstein made forty-four films between 1922 and 1948, all while publishing prolifically. He released three full books and founded the arts journal Promenoir before moving to Paris in 1922. His relocation coincided with the gathering of many impressionist filmmakers and artists in France—including the young Luis Buñuel, who apprenticed on two of Epstein’s films.
Ménilmontant (1925)
Authors: Ionita Maria
Published: September 2018

Ménilmontant is a 38-minute black and white avant-garde French film directed by Dimitri Kirsanoff. Its narrative develops solely through images and montage, without the support of sound or title cards. Ménilmontant tells the story of two young sisters who leave their country home in the wake of their parents’ brutal murder, and settle in the eponymous working-class Parisian neighborhood where they fall prey to the ruthless seduction of a young man. The film is notable for its use of double exposure, the depiction of disorienting urban landscapes via very rapid cutting, as well as for the brutality of the opening and closing scenes.
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972)
Authors: Ionita Maria
Published: September 2018

Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania is an experimental 82-minute color film directed by Jonas Mekas. It documents the director’s and his brother Adolfas’ return to their native village of Semeniškai, Lithuania, for the first time in twenty-five years. The Mekas brothers had fled their village in 1944 trying to escape the war; however, they ended up in a German labor camp. After the end of the war they immigrated to the United States but had great difficulty establishing contact with their extended family that was now living under Soviet occupation.
Hepworth, Dame (Jocelyn) Barbara (1903–1975)
Authors: Bonett Helena
Published: September 2018

Barbara Hepworth was a sculptor, draughtsperson, painter and printmaker, born in Yorkshire but based in London and St Ives in Cornwall, with a career spanning from the late 1920s to her death in 1975. Known for her pioneering abstract sculpture—including pierced forms and multipart arrangements—Hepworth was one of the leaders of the modernist movement in British visual arts. Her work also shares a confluence of ideas with modernists on the continent, many of whom she first met in France in the 1930s. At that time, her work was predominantly carved in wood and stone, but from the 1940s Hepworth began working with new materials, employing stringing and color in her carved pieces, and, in the following decade, using plaster and bronze to create large-scale works. She was a member of many groups, including Abstraction-Création in Paris, the 7 & 5 Society and Unit One in London, and the Penwith Society of Arts in St Ives. Engaged in a male-dominated art form, Hepworth struggled to gain the same recognition as contemporaries such as Henry Moore. Despite these difficulties, however, she gradually gained a reputation on the international stage. Today, Hepworth remains one of Britain’s most famous and best-loved sculptors.
Martinů, Bohuslav (1890–1959)
Authors: Svatos Thomas
Published: September 2018

Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959). Czech composer of Austro-Hungarian, Czechoslovak and American citizenship. He left his native Polička in Eastern Bohemia in 1906 to study violin at the Prague Conservatory. Although initially expelled for negligence, he transferred to the organ department and passed his state examinations in 1912. He continued residing in Prague until 1923, playing as a deputy violinist with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra from 1913 and then as a full member under Václav Talich during the years 1920–23. Largely self-taught in composition, he studied briefly with Josef Suk during the years 1922–23 and with Albert Roussel from the time of his arrival in Paris in 1923; he remained in the French capital until 1940.
Pärt, Arvo (1934–)
Authors: Moody Ivan
Published: September 2018

Arvo Pärt is an Estonian composer whose music has had phenomenal success worldwide since his radical stylistic change from an overtly modernistic aesthetic to a radically simplified, post-tonal idiom. While still a student under Heino Eller, he caused a sensation in Moscow and Leningrad with the première of Nekrolog (1960), the first dodecaphonic work to be written in Estonia.

In 1962, however, Pärt received the first prize in the Competition for Young Composers held in Moscow for Meie aed (Our Garden, 1959), a tonal work, and for the oratorio Maailmaa samm (1961). Between 1958 and 1967, he worked as an engineer at Estonian Radio, afterwards working in Tallinn as a freelance composer.
Comics
Authors: Willmott Glenn
Published: September 2018

The early twentieth century saw the rise of the modern comic strip, the comic book and the artist’s book as distinctive forms of graphic narrative art that merged literary and graphic traditions into new modes of expression. As with literature more broadly, comics have ranged in quality and aims from the banal to the bizarre, from the blandly conventional to the wildly original. Their close association, from their very inception, with a network of advertising and commodity tie-ins has kept them at an uneasy distance from the anti-commercialist culture of High Modernism. Yet the ubiquity of comics in newspapers internationally, and the often absurd, transgressive, and episodic worlds they depicted, ensured their interest to modernist writers and artists more widely.

Comic strips developed out of roots in the satirical genre of editorial and humor cartoons of the nineteenth-century periodical, and, in their unique invention of personified ‘funny animals’, drew as well from folk traditions of the trickster and the animal fable. They often explored subaltern class and ethnic life worlds not prominent in other modern arts, or offered flights of fantasy that directly challenged or therapeutically escaped from social norms.
Giacometti, Giovanni Alberto (1901–1966)
Authors: Finlay John
Published: September 2018

Alberto Giacometti was a titan of twentieth-century art. His rich oeuvre of sculpture, painting and drawing ranks alongside pioneering artists such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Constantin Brâncuşi. Giacometti arrived in Paris in 1922 to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, principally creating drawings in a cubist manner. By the mid-to-late 1920s, Giacometti’s sculpture was intimately associated with Surrealism. Giacometti’s works of the late 1920s and early 1930s combine an exploration of forms with intimations of physical violence, onanistic sex and pain, and are an obvious reassessment of surrealist themes.