bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Seurat, Georges-Pierre (1859–1891)
Authors: Somers Lynn M.
Published: September 2018

Born in Paris in 1859 to a bourgeois family, painter and draughtsman Georges-Pierre Seurat enjoyed a brief but mature career as the leading French Neo-Impressionist. His invention of Divisionism (or "chromo-luminarism"), a painting technique grounded in science and the study of optics, challenged the spontaneity and fluidity of Impressionism, which by the 1880s had been largely subsumed by a capitalist gallery system. In 1886, at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition, Seurat debuted his monumental Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande-Jatte (1884–1886), a "patient tapestry" of line and color that led the art critic and activist Félix Fénéon to coin the term néo-impressionisme. Equally shaped by the Renaissance frescoes of Piero della Francesca and the Baudelairean praise of the ephemerality of modern life, La Grande-Jatte symbolically closed a chapter in French painting. Seurat’s systematic aesthetic produced an indelible impact on fin de siècle artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse, and later Pablo Picasso, Robert Delaunay, and André Breton’s Surrealism, firmly establishing him as integral to the 20th-century avant-garde. Seurat’s oeuvre includes approximately 500 drawings and 6 major figure paintings, an astonishing output for a career that lasted only 11 years.
Shawa, Laila (1940–)
Authors: Sherwell Tina
Published: September 2018

Laila Shawa was born in Gaza in 1940. Between 1957 and 1958, she travelled to Cairo to study art at the Leonardo da Vinci Art Institute. She then pursued her studies in Fine Arts in Rome at the Accademia San Giacomo, University of Rome, receiving her BA in 1960. In her summers, she would travel to participate in the School of Seeing, studying under the famous expressionist artist Oscar Kokoschka in Salzburg, Austria. After the 1967 war, she moved to Beirut, which was a cultural hub for many Palestinians, where she lived and worked until 1975. Thereafter she lived between Gaza and the UK until 1988 and then permanently in the UK. Shawa’s work spans different media: painting, photography, printing, sculpture, and video works, offering sociopolitical critiques of her subject matter that predominantly relates to the Palestinian and Middle East contexts over the decades. Her series "Women and the Veil" of the late 1980s explored the contractions inherent in practices of Arab society, particularly, critiquing consumerism and blind faith in doctrines. She critiques these contexts through playfulness and satire, such as in The Impossible Dream (1988), while in her series of paintings The Hands of Fatima she explored the practices of magic in Arab societies. The paintings dissolve perspectival space into a kaleidoscope of colors, patterns, and rituals.
Vigo, Abraham (1893–1957)
Authors: Dosio Patricia Andrea
Published: September 2018

Abraham Regino Vigo was one of the most talent artists of the first avant-garde in Buenos Aires. He was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, but at the age of 12 started working with his father, a painter and decorator, in Buenos Aires. He studied painting in the Sociedad Estímulo de Bellas Artes like his father. During his career, Vigo exhibited individually and with a socially compromised group of artists, receiving several awards and prizes. Due to health problems, in 1939 he settled in Mendoza and a year later, became an Argentine citizen and, as member of the Communist Party, announced his candidacy in provincial deputy race. When Vigo returned to Buenos Aires, he worked mostly as engraver. His articulation between artistic practice and political militancy represented a modernist feature in local art. More than any other medium, Vigo employed graphic techniques, such as woodcuts, etching, and drawing. Most of his works were illustrations in magazines, newspapers, and low price book editions. Engraving enables the circulation of the images not only in the context of written word but also among popular audience. Vigo’s aimed at a clear image, reproducible, easy to read by workers and separated from the traditional art market.
Werefkin, Marianne (1960–1937)
Authors: Kochman Adrienne
Published: September 2018

Werefkin was born into an aristocratic family and herself a baroness. Her mother, Elizabeth Daragan, was an artist; her father, an army general decorated by the tsar for his accomplishments during the Crimean War (1853–1856).
World of Art (МИР ИССКУСТВА)
Authors: Bowlt John
Published: September 2018

Born in St. Petersburg on the threshold of the 20th century, the World of Art group of artists, writers, and musicians was a primary representative of the Russian Silver Age, supporting the Symbolist notions of artistic sythesism, independence of the work of art from social and political prerequisites, the organic interdependence of the fine and applied arts, and the artist’s right to appreciate and interpret ideas and motifs from many cultures, past and present, East and West, primitive and sophisticated. Led by Sergei Diaghilev, internationally acclaimed for his creation and supervision of the Ballets Russes (1909–1929), the World of Art published its own deluxe art review (1898–1904), organized exhibitions both at home and abroad, and made every attempt to place modern Russian culture in its European context.

To this end, the review published illustrations of French Post-Impressionism and the English Arts and Crafts movement, essays on Richard Wagner, translations of French poetry and drama, and reports on cultural life in Moscow, Paris, London, and elsewhere.
Castel-Bloom, Orly (1960--)
Authors: Grumberg Karen
Published: September 2018

Born in Tel Aviv to Egyptian Jewish parents, the Hebrew author Orly Castel-Bloom studied film at the prestigious Beit-Zvi Institute and at Tel Aviv University before publishing her first collection of short stories, Lo rahok mi-merkaz ha-ir (Not Far from the City Centre) in 1987. Her stories and novels have been translated into 11 languages and have won critical acclaim in Israel and abroad. She has been awarded several domestic and international literary prizes, including the Prime Minister's Prize (1994, 2001, and 2011) and the French WIZO Prize (2005). From the beginning of her literary career, her writing excited the admiration and the ire of Israeli readers and literary critics, prompting a debate between those who considered her sparse, colloquial, and at times slangy Hebrew as fresh and true to life, and those who derided it as superficial and inadequately literary. The latter critics even coined a phrase to describe her use of language, 'ivrit raza' ('thin Hebrew'), situating her squarely against the predominantly male torchbearers of Hebrew literature and their 'rich Hebrew'. Her reputation as a leading contemporary author was established with the publication of her notorious second novel, Doli siti (Dolly City, 1992).
Chang, Eileen (Zhang, Ailing) (1920–2005)
Authors: Shen Shuang
Published: September 2018

Eileen Chang was one of the most unique and distinguished voices in early twentieth century China. Focusing mostly on intricate family and romantic relations in the colonial and urban settings, her early works bridge the divide between tradition and modernity by infusing the Chinese vernacular fiction tradition with modern sensibilities. Her bilingual writings in English and Chinese present a fascinating case study for cross-cultural translation in the context of immigration and Chinese diaspora.

Eileen Chang grew up in a distinguished family of prominent politicians and military leaders during the last dynasty of imperial China. Many myths and memories about her famous ancestors would find their way into Chang’s essays, short stories, and novels. But the part of the family history that most affected Chang was the discord between her parents due to the divergent paths they had chosen between tradition and modernity. Her mother, a prototypical New Woman, left China when Eileen was two years old, and sojourned in Europe for a number of years.
Char, René (1907–1988)
Authors: Bermann Sandra L.
Published: September 2018

The French poet René Char exemplified key aspects of modernism. Initially associated with Surrealism, he collaborated with poets such as André Breton and Paul Eluard, and painters such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Nicolas de Stael. Later, during World War II, he led a Resistance unit in the Maquis, winning renown as ‘Capitaine Alexandre’. During this period he continued to write, though he refused to publish until the war was won. In 1946, Char’s wartime journal, Leaves of Hypnos, appeared, soon followed by his major collection, Fury and Mystery. Acclaimed for both, he went on to complete some of his best known work in the 1950s and 1960s while engaging with numerous artists and the musician Pierre Boulez. He wrote widely, from poetry of striking concreteness and metaphysical reach, to political tracts against the introduction of atomic weapons in Provence. There he lived until his death in 1988, meeting with friends such as Albert Camus, Maurice Blanchot, Martin Heidegger, and Paul Veyne.

Char was born in the town of L’Isle sur la Sorgue, near Avignon, in southern France. His early poetry developed a compressed, irreverent style that explored contrasting themes, often of agony and love.
Chen Yingzhen (1938– )
Authors: Tsu Jing
Published: September 2018

Chen Yingzhen is a prolific writer and influential cultural critic from Taiwan. Born Chen Yongshan in Miaoli County, Chen started to publish fiction in 1959 while majoring in English at Tamkang College. From 1963, his works began to appear in Modern Literature. His earlier works, published between 1959 and 1965, are often melancholic and autobiographical. In 1967, Chen published an essay criticizing modernist works for prioritizing form over content and called, instead, for a literature with a high social consciousness. In 1968, he was apprehended by the Taiwanese Garrison Command and charged with promulgating Communism. He was imprisoned for seven years.

Following his release in 1975 he converted to a realist standpoint and wrote works with moralistic and socialist overtones. He advocated a China-leaning nationalist writing in the Nativist Literary Debate in 1977–1978. He was arrested again shortly before the Formosa (or Kaohsiung) Incident. From 1967 to 1982, he published several stories in Literature Quarterly (Wenxue jikan). His works from this period tackled the problem of the capitalist economic exploitation of the Third World. In 1983 and 1984, Chen published several political stories to highlight the incompatibility between socialist ideals and the increasingly materialistic orientation of society.
Contact Press
Authors: Anstee Cameron
Published: September 2018

Contact Press was an independent Canadian small press founded by Louis Dudek (1918–2001), Irving Layton (1912–2006), and Raymond Souster (1921–2012) that operated from 1952 to 1967. Cerberus (1952), Contact Press’s debut title, included poems and a preface from the three founding editors, establishing an editorial position defined by the will to control the means of publication, to support experimental modernist work, and to oppose dominant post-WWII forces of capitalist industry and commerce in the content and production of their books. As Layton explained in his preface, ‘What brings us together […] is the belief that to write poetry is to say a loud nix to the forces high-pressuring us into conformity or atomic dispersion’ (Dudek and Gnarowski 1967, 145). The name ‘Contact’ was derived from Souster’s little magazine Contact (1952–1954), which derived its name from American magazine Contact, edited by William Carlos Williams and Robert McAlmon (1920–1923, 1932). The name was also used for Souster’s Toronto-based Contact Poetry Reading Series (1957–1962). Contact Press published significant books by many of Canada’s important modernist poets and established a viable precedent for Canadian small presses that has persisted in its influence into the twenty-first century.
Crosby, Harry (1898–1929)
Authors: Setz Cathryn
Published: September 2018

Harry Crosby, wealthy nephew of J. P. Morgan, was a notorious rebel in moneyed Bostonian circles, an expatriate in Paris during the 1920s, and partner to the equally legendary Caresse Crosby, with whom he spent eight years living in an open marriage. History has overlooked the Crosbys for being dilettantish or the product of sensationalizing hearsay rather than serious literary endeavor. Such a critical paucity is misleading, however. The Crosbys set up the Black Sun Press, famous for its deluxe publication of early portions of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake among other titles, with various editions illustrated by Max Ernst. The Black Sun Press was privately funded by the Crosbys, and became, according to Sy Kahn, ‘one of the most adventurous publishers of the decade’ (1970: 45).

Harry Crosby was devoted to modernist poetry and literary innovation. A significant correspondent and reader of Hart Crane’s ongoing works, Crosby was also a silent benefactor to Maria Jolas and Eugene Jolas’s Little Magazine transition. Crosby funded the magazine with a regular $100 for the editors to support the best new poets of the day.
Nkosi, Lewis (1936–2010)
Authors: Steibel Lindy
Published: September 2018

Lewis Nkosi is increasingly recognized as one of South Africa’s foremost literary critics, and also as an iconoclastic writer of novels and plays. His years as an exile during the apartheid era meant, however, that his reputation within South Africa was for some time less secure than it was abroad. Born in Chesterville, a black Durban township, Nkosi came from a female-headed, working-class family. He was mission-schooled in Eshowe and then embarked on a career that began with a short but important journalistic stint at Drum magazine. To take up a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard in 1961, Nkosi left South Africa on a one-way exit permit. For the rest of his life he lived variously in England, Zambia, Poland, the USA and Switzerland, following a writing and academic career.

Nkosi’s style is a distinctive one, at odds with much of the naturalist writing that characterized South African black ‘protest’ fiction of the apartheid years. Influenced by the writings of Faulkner, Kafka and Joyce, Nkosi’s style is modernist, suggestive and symbolic. His loyalty to form, and to the stringent demands of a modernist perception of art, is evident in his critical essays, gathered into three collections: Home and Exile (1965), The Transplanted Heart: essays on South Africa (1975), and Tasks and Masks: themes and styles of African literature (1981).
Rhys, Jean (1890-1979)
Authors: Taylor-Batty Juliette
Published: September 2018

Jean Rhys was a Dominican novelist and short-story writer. Her career can be divided into two main periods: her modernist fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, which depicts the bohemian demi-monde in Europe of the time as experienced by vulnerable female protagonists on the margins of respectability, and her later work, which came after a long hiatus with the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Wide Sargasso Sea, her best known novel, is a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and an important text within postcolonial studies.
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886-1965)
Authors: Jortner David
Published: September 2018

Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886-1965) was a leading novelist, playwright and theorist of the Taishō and Shōwa eras. Although best known as a novelist, Tanizaki’s plays also reflected his literary concerns with eroticism, aestheticism, and decadence.

Tanizaki Jun’ichirō was born in Tokyo to a middle-class family. Tanizaki mentions having had a privileged childhood; his parents often took him to the theatre and exposed the author to the traditional Japanese arts. However, numerous business reversals resulted in a decline of the family’s fortune; Tanizaki had to abandon his studies at the University of Tokyo in 1911 for a lack of money.

Tanizaki began writing while still a student at the University of Tokyo, publishing his first play in a literary magazine in 1909. He continued to write short stories, plays and novels throughout the 1910s and early 1920s. In 1923 Tanizaki’s house in Yokohama was destroyed by the great Kantō earthquake; he subsequently moved to the Osaka area. His work changed at this time as he became less interested in issues of modernity and the West and more involved with Japanese aesthetics and tradition. Tanizaki continued to write until 1943, when the serialization of his novel Sasemeyuki (The Makioka Sisters, 1943-1948) was stopped by the militarist government.
The New Woman
Authors: Zrakowski Caroline Z.
Published: September 2018

A historical figure as well as a literary phenomenon, the New Woman was named in 1894 in an exchange between ‘Ouida’ (Marie Louise de la Ramée) and Sarah Grand in the pages of the New American Review. The New Woman was a ubiquitous presence in fin-de-siècle literature and journalism concerned with debates about the ‘woman question’, and influenced twentieth-century ideas about feminism and gender. The New Woman novel, with its mapping of female psychological space and emphasis on female consciousness, shaped modernist fiction.

New Women were often political activists as well as writers, and agitated for reform on political and domestic questions. Most New Woman fiction rejects aestheticism in favor of realism; it deals with sexuality with a frankness that departed from Victorian codes of propriety and takes up issues such as suffrage, marriage, domestic violence, and the emancipation of women. In its realism, New Woman fiction departs from the aestheticism of the period, although some writers, like George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright), used the techniques of aestheticism to examine women’s experience.
Jean Toomer (1894—1967)
Authors: Knewitz Simone
Published: September 2018

Jean Toomer (26 December 1894—30 March 1967) was an American writer associated with literary modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. He was born as Nathan Pinchback Toomer in Washington, D.C., and changed his name to Jean Toomer at the beginning of his writing career in 1920. Toomer is primarily known for his critically acclaimed book Cane (1923), an experimental collage text of narratives, dramatic pieces, and poems. He also published essays, literary reviews and criticism, poems, dramatic texts, and stories in journals and newspapers. Though opposing reductive racial categories, Toomer was in close contact with the New Negro movement, initiated by Alain Locke, while he was working on Cane. Being of multiracial descent, he could easily pass for white, and lived both as black and white at different stages of his life. After the publication of Cane, he rejected all racial classifications. In the early 1920s, Toomer turned toward the spiritual ideas of George Gurdjieff, whose school of higher consciousness and spiritual self-development he followed and taught himself until 1935. In his later life, he became interested in Quakerism. With the exception of a collection of aphorisms, Toomer did not publish any more books after Cane during his lifetime.
Tzara, Tristan (1896-1963)
Authors: Gammel Irene
Published: September 2018

Born Samuel (Samy or Sami) Rosenstock in Moineşti, Romania, Tristan Tzara was an avant-garde poet, performer, critic, and film director. Together with Hugo Ball, Hans Richter, and Richard Huelsenbeck, Tzara founded Dada in Zurich, Switzerland, as an iconoclastic and fiercely anti-bourgeois protest movement in art, active from February 1916 to 1920. Though introduced by Ball, the word Dada first appeared in print in Tzara’s anti-war Dada novelette The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Fire Extinguisher (1916) (Dickerman 33). The Romanian poet flaunted himself with his adopted name, wearing spats and his trademark monocle, just as he flaunted the word Dada in banners, posters, advertisements, and a journal, presciently branding the nonsensical movement its trademark. Like a modern-day Seinfeld, deeply steeped in Romanian Jewish humor and culture, Tzara’s Dada claimed to be about ‘nothing’, as famously formulated in his 1918 ‘Dada Manifesto’. Thus Tzara’s Dada exhibited a distinctly nihilistic and absurdist dimension, as seen, for example, in his 1920 poem, which offers instructions on how ‘To Make a Dadaist Poem’ from newspaper clippings.
Van der Post, Laurens (1906-1996)
Authors: Ullyatt Tony
Published: September 2018

Laurens van der Post was born on December 13, 1906 in the village of Phillipolis, in what was then the Orange River Colony. He was the thirteenth of the family’s fifteen children and the fifth son. His father, Christiaan, who came from Dutch stock, was a lawyer and politician who had fought against the British during the Second Anglo-Boer War. Van der Post’s mother, Lammie, was of German origin. Growing up on the farm, van der Post came into contact with the black people and the wilderness, two major influences on his life and his writing. Van der Post went to school in Grey College in Bloemfontein, where he was exposed to a line of political thinking embodying a racial philosophy entirely contrary to his own experiences of the indigenous peoples who were to play such a significant role in his adult life. In 1925, he became a junior reporter for the Natal Advertiser newspaper in Durban. In 1926, with William Plomer and Roy Campbell, he founded Voorslag, a journal lasting only three volumes. It was forced to close through lack of support for its radical opinions and its promotion of a more integrated South Africa.
El Saadawi, Nawal (1931–)
Authors: Mirdamadi Yaser
Published: September 2018

Nawal El Saadawi is a renowned Egyptian writer, novelist, feminist activist, political dissident, physician, and psychiatrist. The main theme of her work is the suppression and suffering of women in a patriarchal society backed by religion. She is particularly famous for her struggle against female circumcision. She is regarded as one of the most radical feminists of the Arab and Muslim world.
Finch, Robert (1900–1995)
Authors: Hall Molly
Published: September 2018

Canadian poet, editor, and critic Robert Finch was born on May 14, 1900 in Long Island, New York, but immigrated to Canada, adopting it as his homeland. Like most of the Canadian modernist poets he wrote his best-known poetry during the 1930s when the Depression precluded the real possibility of publication. His work was included in several seminal Canadian collections of the mid-century, including New Provinces: Poems of Several Authors (1936) and The Book of Canadian Poetry (1943), signaling that he had "arrived" as a poetic intellectual.
Finlay, Ian Hamilton (1925–2006)
Authors: Rodger Calum
Published: September 2018

Scottish poet, artist, and self-described "avant-gardener" Ian Hamilton Finlay is best known for his Concrete Poetry of the 1960s and a number of ambitious outdoor works that fuse language, sculpture, tradition, and landscape with a playful wit and neoclassical rigor. The most famous of these is his poetry garden, Little Sparta, at Stonypath in the Pentland Hills of southern Scotland, where he lived and worked from 1966 until his death.
Generación del 98
Authors: Galindo Gloria
Published: September 2018

The Generation of ’98, a Spanish literary and cultural movement that was active during the first two decades of the 20th century, brought together a group of writers, poets, and intellectuals born between 1864 and 1876, who were against both the politics of the conservative ruling class, as well as the principle of Realism as postulated by the likes of Benito Pérez Galdós and José Echegaray on the literary scene of Madrid at the end of the 19th century.
George, Stefan (1868–1933)
Authors: Norton Robert E.
Published: September 2018

Stefan George was one of the most original and influential poets to have written in German in the last 150 years. During his lifetime he was regarded by some as the greatest German poet after Goethe, and not a few thought he was the greatest one of all. Yet, for a variety of reasons, George’s works almost completely disappeared from view shortly after his death, and only recently have they been rediscovered by a wider reading public. It is noteworthy, however, that this renewed interest in George has focused less on his poetry than on his life, and in particular on the nature of his sexuality and his political views. No matter how one evaluates these aspects of his extra-literary significance, George can rightfully claim our attention as the author of some of the most remarkable and powerful verse in the German language.
Ghosh, Sankha (1932–)
Authors: Bhattacharya Sourin
Published: September 2018

Sankha Ghosh has been a major figure in Bengali poetry since the 1950s. The son of Manindra Kumar and Amalabala Ghosh, he was born in Chandpur, in present-day Bangladesh, the family’s ancestral home district being Barisal. Manindra Kumar was an eminent school headmaster and an ardent admirer of Tagore. Ghosh attended school in Chandraprabha Vidyapith in Paksi, Pabna. The ambience of this school exerted a strong influence on his early development. He was later educated at the Presidency College and at the University of Calcutta. He taught literature at several universities prior to his retirement from Jadavpur University as Professor of Bengali.
Gombrowicz, Witold (1904–1969)
Authors: Butler Erik
Published: September 2018

Born into a wealthy landed family, Gombrowicz debuted in the avant-garde milieu of interwar Warsaw. In 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland, he was on a journalistic assignment in Argentina, where he spent most of his adult life. Most of Gombrowicz’s works were first printed by the Polish expatriate press in Paris. In 1963 he returned to Europe. Retiring to Vence, in the south of France, he never saw his native land again.
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von (1874–1929)
Authors: George Alys
Published: September 2018

Hugo von Hofmannsthal was a leading Austrian writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His prolific works span a wide range of genres, from lyric poetry, verse drama, and narrative prose to dramatic tragedy, comedy, opera libretti, and essays. An early member of the Young Vienna literary circle and a precocious poet, Hofmannsthal was later chiefly known for his dramatic works and conservative, yet cosmopolitan views regarding Austrian culture, all of which converged in his co-founding of the Salzburg Festival.

Born into an ennobled, well-situated Viennese banking family, Hofmannsthal was a Wunderkind, successfully publishing his first poem as a sixteen-year-old in 1890 under the pseudonym Loris Melikow. He immediately became a core member of Young Vienna, and his poetry found a wide readership. Throughout his law studies at the University of Vienna from 1892 to 1894 and a year of voluntary military service (1894–1895), he never ceased writing. In 1899 Hofmannsthal completed a doctorate in Romance philology in Vienna and worked toward his Habilitation, but eventually discarded his academic career aspirations in favor of writing. In 1901 he married Gertrud Schlesinger, with whom he had three children, and moved to Rodaun, then a suburb of Vienna, where he lived until his death.
Hurston, Zora Neale (1891–1960)
Authors: Freeman Marshall Jennifer
Published: September 2018

Zora Neale Hurston was a writer and anthropologist. Since the Black Arts and Feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, she has been commonly acclaimed for her authorship of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). She also penned poetry, short stories, plays, collections of folklore, journal articles, journalistic essays, and two ethnographies based on her anthropological fieldwork. Hurston was a prominent member of the Harlem Renaissance, variously referred to as the New Negro Movement or Negro Renaissance. This cultural arts and political movement was primarily concerned with addressing and uplifting conditions of Negro life, and central figures of the movement held complex and divergent views on how best to achieve this end. In general, the times called for a greater recognition of the abilities and contributions of Negro people in the USA and abroad, which included, for some, a celebration of southern US folk culture and references to African aesthetics. The renaissance spanned the period between 1917 and the mid-1930s and, although scholars offer various dates, it is generally marked by the end of the First World War through the Great Depression and includes the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the more urban centers of the North and Midwest. As a literary movement, its critical debates and conventions overlap and are often inextricable from modernist literary trends during the same period. Hurston’s body of work, which spanned some thirty years, reflects this zeitgeist of narrative, vernacular, and thematic experimentation. Additionally, Hurston’s education and research within the relatively nascent field of American anthropology, also influenced by modernist trends in the social sciences, contributed to the experimental elements in her literary productions.
Kraus, Karl (1874–1936)
Authors: Martens Gunther
Published: September 2018

Karl Kraus was a famous literary and cultural critic and a cult figure in Vienna’s intellectual scene around 1900. He was the editor of the journal Die Fackel [The Torch] (1899–1936). From 1911 onwards he filled this journal’s pages all by himself. He was originally affiliated with key writers and art critics in Vienna and Berlin (Hermann Bahr, Maximilian Harden, Alfred Kerr), but fell out with most of them. His public persona as a polemicist, an intellectual pit bull and an outsider was carefully crafted.
George Lamming (1927– )
Authors: Phillips George Micajah
Published: September 2018

George Lamming’s fiction, poetry, criticism, and journalism have been foundational for 20th-century Caribbean and African diasporic identities. To date, he is the author of six loosely connected novels, and is arguably best known for In the Castle of My Skin (1953), The Emigrants (1954), and his widely read critical work, The Pleasures of Exile (1960). In these and other texts, Lamming critiques colonial rule and European hegemony on their own terms through recurring themes such as language, Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, and Christopher Columbus, and through an elliptical narrative style that experiments with point of view, temporality, and dialect as alternative strategies of representation.

Born in Carrington Village, Barbados, in 1927, Lamming briefly moved to Trinidad before becoming one of thousands of West Indians to relocate to post-war England. After settling in London in 1950, he worked for Caribbean Voices, a BBC radio programme that provided a platform for displaced West Indian writers during the 1940s and 1950s. The programme helped Lamming to secure a contract for his first novel, In the Castle of My Skin, which was published in 1953 to almost immediate international success. Based on his own early life, the novel centers on the childhood, colonial education, and young adulthood of "G."
Lowell, Amy (1874–1925)
Authors: Konkol Margaret
Published: September 2018

Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, to a prominent Boston family, Amy Lowell was a poet, lecturer, editor, and critic who was particularly well known for her popularization of imagism in the USA. From 1912 until her death she lived with her companion Ada Russell Dwyer, to whom many of her love poems are directed. During her short but prolific writing career she published more than 650 poems and lectured widely on the "New Poetry," introducing an American audience to free verse and shaping popular literary tastes. In 1925, at the height of her popularity, having struggled with ill health for much of her life, she died at the age of fifty-one of a cerebral haemorrhage. Later that year she was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for What’s O’Clock.
Maeterlinck, Maurice (1862–1949)
Authors: Baetens Jan
Published: September 2018

Maurice Maeterlinck was a Flemish francophone writer, who spent most of his life in France and whose prolific oeuvre entails poetry, plays, and essays. In 1911 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, mainly for his merits in the field of symbolist playwriting and his reputation as a man of great wisdom. However, his contemporary reputation also stems from the musical compositions that appeared around 1900 having been inspired by some of his dramas. Take the musical compositions inspired by his Pelléas and Mélisande (1892, first performed in 1893): an orchestral suite by Gabriel Fauré; an opera by Claude Debussy; a symphonic poem by Arnold Schoenberg; and a suite by Jean Sibelius.
Archipenko, Alexander (1887–1964)
Authors: Kochman Adrienne
Published: September 2018

Alexander Archipenko studied painting and sculpture at the Kiev Art school from 1902 until 1905, when he was expelled for criticizing its conservatism. Outside formal schooling, he was interested in ancient art indigenous to Ukraine—stone sculptures of females known as "babas," Scythian works, as well as those from Neolithic Trypillian culture being excavated in the region at the time. These would inform his work throughout his career, as would ancient Egyptian, pre-Columbian and Byzantine art. His polychromed sculpture was exhibited in his first show in 1906 in a village outside Kiev. He moved to Moscow that same year, participated in group exhibitions, and saw French avant-garde art first-hand, particularly the first "Zolotoe runo" Salon in spring 1908. Later that year, he moved to Paris, and after two weeks at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, decided to study independently from direct observation of art works at local museums. Archipenko opened a studio and built relationships with many artists of the cubist circle, particularly brothers Marcel Duchamp and Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Fernand Léger. He first exhibited with them in 1910 at the Salon des Independents XXVI, joining them regularly until their last group show in 1920.
Nin, Anaïs (1903–1977)
Authors: Arvay Emily Rose
Published: September 2018

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) was a provocative author and socialite known as much for her prose as for her scintillating personal life. Nin’s literary corpus includes lyrical autobiographical novellas as well as non-fictional essays; however, critics most often laud Nin’s literary contributions to the genre of women’s erotica. The author gained cult status in the late 1970s following the publication of her sexually candid diaries. Born in Paris and raised in Europe, Nin spent her adult life commuting between New York and California. The central motifs that recur in Nin’s prose attest to the author’s long-standing interest in Surrealism and psychoanalytic theory.
Baum, Vicki (1888–1960)
Authors: Saloman Randi
Published: September 2018

Vicki Baum was born as Hedwig Baum to a Jewish family in Vienna. Trained as a musician in her youth, Baum studied the harp at the Vienna Conservatory and played in a German orchestra for three years. She is best known for her novels Stud. chem. Helene Willfüer (1928) and Menschen im Hotel (1929). The English translation of the latter as Grand Hotel (1932) inspired the Academy Award-winning Hollywood film of the same name. This Hollywood adaptation, along with the numerous translations of Menschen im Hotel, brought Baum international fame.
Benedict, Ruth (1887–1948)
Authors: Doran Emma
Published: September 2018

Known as America’s first woman anthropologist, Ruth Fulton Benedict was a cultural relativist and folklorist. She studied anthropology under Franz Boas (1858–1942) at Columbia University, received her PhD in 1923 and thereafter joined the faculty. Margaret Mead (1901–78) was her student and protégée, and the two maintained a lifelong friendship. Among Benedict’s contributions to the field of anthropology was her publication Patterns of Culture (1934), in which she directed anthropology toward a comparative analysis of culture, through which we learn about a given culture by contextualizing it with others without making moral judgments.
Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna (‘HPB’) (1831–1891)
Authors: Spears Jamie
Published: September 2018

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (known as ‘HPB’ to her inner circle) claimed that from childhood she possessed the gift of clairvoyance. She used this well-publicized fact to her advantage in 1875, when she founded the Theosophical Society in New York, with her life/business partner Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907).
Blixen, Karen (1885–1962)
Authors: Magnusson Gisli
Published: September 2018

Karen Blixen was a singular figure in 20th century Danish literary life. In the 1930s, when Blixen started writing, Danish literature was dominated by social realism centred on the contemporary world. Blixen nourished the myth of herself as the timeless aristocratic storyteller who wrote her works independently of her own historical context. However, by drawing lines to Nietzsche, existentialism, and psychology, Blixen scholars have clearly demonstrated that she belongs to modernism. As her contemporary Samuel Becket, she was a bilingual author (she wrote her works in English and Danish).

Karen Blixen’s life can be divided into three different phases: During the first (1903–1913), Blixen studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and wrote her first works under the pseudonym Osceola. The second begins in 1914, when she moved to Kenya (British East Africa) with Bror Blixen. The two were separated in 1921, leaving Karen Blixen to run the coffee farm at Ngong Hills alone until financial problems forced her to sell it in 1932. Finally, in 1931, Blixen returned to Denmark and remained at the family manor Rungstedlund until her death in 1962.
Blok, Aleksander (БЛОК, АЛЕКСАНДР) (1880–1921)
Authors: White Frederick H.
Published: September 2018

One of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets, Aleksander Aleksandrovich Blok (1880–1921) was a representative of the ‘second wave’ of Russian Symbolists. Two books of poetry, Verses on a Beautiful Lady (1904) and Inadvertent Joy (1907), and his lyric drama, The Showbooth, staged in 1906, made him famous. Paradoxically, Blok began to openly mock his former Symbolist ideals after 1905, even as he was considered by many to be the leader of Russian Symbolism. In particular, Blok was concerned with the widening gulf between the common people and the intelligentsia. As his disillusionment deepened, his poetry was haunted by a sense of imminent catastrophe. Therefore, his initial response to the revolution of 1917 was positive, seeing in it an apocalyptic moment that would bring renewal and regeneration after a period of chaos and destruction. This idea was realized in his poem The Twelve (1918) which celebrates the October Revolution and placed Christ at the head of a gang of Red Army soldiers. Blok, however, soon realized that the Bolsheviks would not embody the revolutionary ideals that he wished to support, causing him to become disenchanted and deeply depressed. Blok only lived for another three and a half years, dying in August 1921.
The Boer War (1899–1902)
Authors: Phillips George Micajah
Published: September 2018

The British Empire waged two wars in southern Africa at the close of the nineteenth century. In the First Boer War (or Transvaal War) of 1880–81, Boer soldiers repelled Britain’s attempt to annex the diamond-rich Transvaal. The tense peace that followed was broken by the outbreak of the Second Boer War (or South African War, or Anglo-Boer War) of 1899–1902, the largest and most significant war the British Empire waged between the 1857 Indian Rebellion and the Great War of 1914–18. Fighting began when Britain sought to declare sovereignty over the Transvaal and Orange Free State, where huge gold deposits had recently been discovered. This provoked anti-British sentiment in southern Africa and among Britain’s colonial rivals, inspiring volunteer soldiers from the Netherlands and Germany to fight alongside the ethnically Dutch and German Boers. In the end, Britain lost millions of pounds and thousands of lives before reaching a peace settlement that would recognize British control over the Boer republics while offering a path to self-government (laying the foundations for both the Union of South Africa in 1910 and that dominion’s white separatist rule). In England, the war also exacerbated concerns over national degeneration when more than one-half of recruits failed military fitness exams (owing to the deprived living conditions of the urban poor), raising fresh questions about Britain’s imperial ambitions at the turn of the century. Though initially a popular war among Britons, the war’s grim aftermath had a deeper impact on modernism. ‘Since that period,’ Ford Madox Ford (né Hueffer) reflected, ‘the whole tone of England appears to me to have entirely changed’ (171).
Bell, Vanessa (1879–1961)
Authors: Brockington Grace
Published: September 2018

Vanessa Bell was a painter and decorative artist, and an innovator in interior design, who became central to the development of modernism in Britain in the early 20th century. As a member of the Bloomsbury Group, she was a key figure in the ground-breaking Omega Workshops, set up by the artist and critic Roger Fry in 1913. She worked across several media, including painting, print-making, photography and textiles; and she designed illustrations and dusk-jackets for the Hogarth Press, notably for books published by her sister, the writer Virginia Woolf. Her work was at its most radical between 1910 and 1920, when she was among the first artists in Britain to respond to "post-impressionism," a term coined by Fry to describe the new art from Europe. Her experimental art explored the limits of representation through a variety of modernist techniques, including bold use of color, emphatic outlines, flattened surfaces, and papier collé, while her subjects were often intimate and domestic.
Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901)
Authors: Kotte Claudia
Published: September 2018

The Boxer Rebellion (November 1899–September 1901) was a Chinese national uprising against what was seen as the corrupting influence of western ideologies and practices. Initiated in Shandong province by a cult called the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, known by foreign nationals as Boxers, the uprising was simultaneously a peasants’ insurgency, an anti-imperialist movement and a blow to the power of the Qing state. In the late 1890s the Boxers believed that foreign missionaries, Chinese Christian converts and foreigners in general were to blame for a series of natural disasters that had struck northern China. Animosity turned into violence as the rebels burned churches and railways and killed Christians. The movement spread, and in June 1900 the Boxers besieged the embassy area known as Legation Quarter in Beijing. The Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), who until early 1900 had tried to suppress the Boxers, now openly supported them with imperial troops. The 55-day siege ended with a defeat of China and a victory of the eight allied nations (Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom and the USA), who had sent in 20,000 troops. The final protocol left the Chinese government humbled and financially crippled, with reparations to be paid over 39 years.
Brentano, Franz (1838–1917)
Authors: Kujundzic Neb
Published: September 2018

Born in Marienberg, Germany, and active as a philosophy professor and Privatdozent (unsalaried teacher) at universities in Würzburg (1872–73) and Vienna (1874–1895), Franz Clemens Brentano profoundly influenced nineteenth-century western philosophy and psychology, also leaving an indelible mark on the natural sciences, economics and related disciplines. Incorporating Aristotelian philosophy within the empiricist methods favoured by the early nineteenth-century sciences, Brentano strove to combine the emergent philosophical modes of introspection with scientific exactitude. A precursor of modern phenomenology and Gestalt psychology, whose students included Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl and Carl Stumpf, Brentano is best known for concepts developed in his 1874 work Psychologie vom Empirischen Standpunkt (Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint), such as ‘intentionality’, what Brentano sees as a central aspect of mental phenomena; and ‘perception’, what he reads as a ‘misception’ or misperception (Wahrnehmung ist Falschnehmung). For some scholars, the history of modern western philosophy begins with Franz Brentano, although some of the trends associated with his legacy counter modernism’s rejection of realism and the trust in science’s ability to define the nature of reality.
Brooks, Cleanth (1906–1994)
Authors: Meehan Adam
Published: September 2018

Cleanth Brooks was born in Murray, Kentucky, and spent most of the first half of his life in the American South. He taught at Louisiana State University (LSU) from 1932 until 1947, when he took a position at Yale. While at LSU, he and colleague Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) co-edited The Southern Review, which published both critical essays and creative writing, including that of modernist writers Ford Maddox Ford and Wallace Stevens. His prolific work on Southern writers, especially William Faulkner, made an unparalleled contribution to the study of Southern literature in America. He is perhaps best known for his influence on New Criticism, which pioneered an approach to the study of poetry that involved analyzing the structural, rhetorical and metaphorical elements of a poem through close reading, rather than relying on biographical and historical details for interpretation. Brooks expounded upon this method in his two most renowned books, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939), which includes a classic reading of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947). These works, together with the popular textbook Understanding Poetry (1938), co-written with Warren, revolutionized the teaching of poetry in American higher education.
Charles Tory Bruce (1906–1971)
Authors: Huculak J. Matthew
Published: September 2018

Charles Tory Bruce was born in Port Shoreham, Nova Scotia on 11 May 1906; he died in Toronto, Ontario on 19 December 1971.

Upon graduating from Mount Allison University in 1927, the year his first book of poetry Wild Apples appeared, Bruce began his life long profession as a journalist, first with the Halifax Morning-Chronicle, and then with the Canadian Press’s New York Bureau (1928–33). In Halifax, Bruce began his affiliation with the Song Fisherman Circle, a relationship that shaped his second book of poems, Tomorrow’s Tide (1932). In 1933, Bruce transferred to Toronto, where he published four more books of poetry: Personal Note (1941), Grey Ship Moving (1945), The Flowering Summer (1947), and The Mulgrave Road (1951), which won the Governor General’s Literary Award (1951).

Though Bruce’s regional poetics are not generally regarded as avant-garde, A. J. M. Smith included him in the seminal Book of Canadian Poetry (1943) on the basis that his work ‘represent[s] a certain "aspect" of the modern movement’ in its ‘simplification of technique’.
Bryher (1894–1983)
Authors: Kusch Celena E.
Published: September 2018

Born in Margate, England, the illegitimate daughter of British multi-millionaire Sir John Ellerman, Bryher resisted gender and marriage conventions throughout her life. Best known as the lifelong same-sex partner of H. D., Bryher also served as a major patron, funder, and advocate of modernism in literature, film, politics, and psychoanalysis. She founded/co-founded three presses, a film production company, and two magazines, Close Up (1927–1933) and Life and Letters Today (1935–1950). Her works include two memoirs, two poetry collections, five non-fiction books, four films, and sixteen autobiographical or historical novels which explore gender roles and issues of national and international upheaval and progress. In 1933, Bryher published ‘What Shall You Do in the War?’ then directly assisted 105 refugees, many psychoanalysts, from Nazi rule.