bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Teatro Prometeo
Authors: Fonseca Pacheco Fernando
Published: September 2018

Teatro Prometeo (Prometheus Theater) was founded in Cuba by actor and director Francisco Morín (1918– ) in 1948. Prometeo began as a fundraising project for the magazine of the same name, also founded by Morín in 1947, which was encountering financial problems around the occasion of its one-year anniversary. Morín established the Teatro Prometeo group and staged the play Ligados (Welded) by Eugene O´Neill to raise money to support the magazine. The magazine’s goal was to foster the culture of theater in Cuba through the medium of print, so that members of the public and theater practitioners could inform and educate themselves. Based on similar premises, Teatro Prometeo aimed to stage plays by both national and international writers that had never before been staged in Cuba. Teatro Prometeo intended to generate national theatrical production while also keeping up with international trends in theater and performance by periodically staging the most important plays of world theater.
Tendulkar, Vijay (1928–2008)
Authors: Dharwadker Aparna
Published: September 2018

Vijay Tendulkar was an Indian playwright, screen and television writer, literary essayist, fiction writer, political journalist, and social commentator whose work in multiple genres represents one of the most versatile and distinguished creative careers of the post-independence period shaped broadly by the aesthetics and politics of modernism. From the early 1950s until his death in 2008, he was a singularly influential theatre figure in Marathi—the principal language of the state of Maharashtra—which has a millennium-long literary history and more than seventy million speakers. Tendulkar’s screenplays, in contrast, were written for films in Hindi, India’s majority language and the preferred medium of the world’s largest film industry. In the urban as well as non-urban settings of his plays and screenplays, he employed forms of social realism tempered with powerfully poetic structures of imagery, thought, and experience, and emerged as independent India’s first ‘national’ playwright because of the depth and breadth of his engagement with the particulars of lower- and middle-class life in the postcolonial city.
Treadwell, Sophie (1885–1970)
Authors: Walker Julia A.
Published: September 2018

Like many women writers of her day, American playwright Sophie Treadwell began her career in journalism, working at the San Francisco Bulletin and the New York Herald Tribune, where she wrote fanciful vignettes before earning the right to cover sensational murder trials of female defendants and report from behind the front lines of war (including an interview with Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa). These assignments appear to have imprinted her dramatic style, which often tempered realistic situations with surreal, sometimes violent, imagery; a well-made play structure with an episodic logic; and the predictability of a character type with an unexpected act of rebellion.

Treadwell, who wrote over forty plays (seven of which were produced on Broadway), is best known for Machinal (1928), an expressionist drama about a ‘young woman’ who is coercively compelled to enact the roles of secretary, daughter, wife, and mother over the short course of her doomed life. Only in an illicit love affair does she find true happiness, taking inspiration from her lover’s tales of renegade justice in Mexico to free herself from her oppressive marriage by killing her husband. But her freedom is short-lived, as the social order hails her back into its defining structures. After being forced to fit the pre-set narratives of a sensationalistic press, her life is condemned by the law before finally being taken from her by way of the electric chair.
Loy, Mina (1882–1966)
Authors: Devaney Beulah Maud
Published: September 2018

Mina Loy, born Mina Gertrude Lowry, (1882–1966), was a British artist, designer, model, novelist, nurse, playwright and poet, with ties to the Dadaist, Futurist and Surrealist moments. Loy was one of the first generation modernists and was close friends with many leaders of the movement including Djuna Barnes, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams. Her poetry was published in The Little Review and championed by Left Bank publisher Robert McAlmon.

Mina Loy was born in London in 1882, the eldest daughter of Sigmund and Julia Bryant Lowry. In 1899, at the age of seventeen, Loy left school and moved to Munich to study art with the painter and graphic artist Angelo Jank. Jank, a member of the Munich Secession, introduced Loy to the work of newly emerging European thinkers, including Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Adès, Thomas (1971 – )
Authors: Venn Edward
Published: September 2018

Thomas Adès is one of the leading international composers of his generation. His music builds on twentieth-century developments in rhythm, texture and performing virtuosity, and draws on a wide range of influences both contemporary, ‘classical’ and popular. As a conductor and pianist he specialises in both his own music, that of his contemporaries, and twentieth-century repertoire.
Etkin, Mariano (1943-)
Authors: Vázquez Hernán Gabriel
Published: September 2018

Mariano Etkin is an Argentinean composer, among the most important Latin-American composers of the second half of the twentieth century. He received his main musical education in his hometown, Buenos Aires, and continued his studies in the United States and Europe. Both his musical creation and his theoretical production are a benchmark for composers and researchers. By exploring perception thresholds, Etkin’s works unfold between real and apparent in a profuse and ambiguous sound world. His writings address the study of musical works and issues around music creation.
MacGreevy, Thomas (1950–1963)
Authors: Schreibman Susan
Published: September 2018

Thomas MacGreevy was a poet, art and literary critic, and Director of the National Gallery of Ireland (1950-63). MacGreevy was born in 1893, during the closing decades of the British Empire, in Tarbert, County Kerry, one of the most westerly points of both the Empire and Europe. His childhood, pleasant and uneventful, provided him with the dual pillars of faith and nationalism that underpinned the vast majority of his writings. These pillars found their expression in writing in the early 1920s, after he returned to live in Ireland after working as a Civil Servant in London from 1912, and serving as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery in the British Expeditionary Force in 1917–18.

MacGreevy is an extremely autobiographic poet. The poems in the single book of poetry to appear in his lifetime, Poems, (Heinemann, 1934) were ordered chronologically (as opposed to thematically or when they were written). War: the Great War, the Anglo-Irish War, and the Irish Civil War, are reoccurring themes. While much of MacGreevy’s poetry was about Ireland, exile provided the necessary geographic and psychic distance to write about it. MacGreevy, attuned to the new in both the written and visual arts, wrote what the Irish poet and critic Anthony Cronin described as ‘the most perfectly modulated free verse written in the period in English, Ireland, or America’.
Serge Garant (1929--1986)
Authors: Bazin Paul
Published: September 2018

Composer, conductor, teacher, radio host, artistic director and music critic, Serge Garant has been one of the main figures in the Canadian contemporary music landscape. His early works bore the influences of Messiaen and Boulez, and his maturity style was that of a complex alloy between the rigorous post-serialism structural tendencies and controlled indeterminacy. Lyrical by nature, the music of Serge Garant is a rich testimony of a search for a balance between rigor and intuition, a goal shared by several composers of his generation.
Sorabji, Kaikhosru Shapurji (1892–1988)
Authors: Roberge Marc-André
Published: September 2018

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji was an English composer, pianist, music critic, and writer about music mainly associated with large-scale works for the piano lasting several hours and requiring virtuosity and stamina well beyond anything in the standard repertoire. He also wrote songs, chamber and orchestral works, piano concertos, and symphonies for organ. Most of his works are characterized by a highly ornamented impressionistic style and formal structures like variations and fugues, and rely on an individual style derived from his self-study of the music of composers whose music he championed all his life (Liszt, Alkan, Busoni, Medtner, Godowsky, Reger, Skryabin, Szymanowski).
Tremblay, Gilles (1932--)
Authors: Lefebvre Marie-Thérèse
Published: September 2018

Composer and musical pedagogue Gilles Tremblay made significant contributions to the development of musical composition in Quebec in the second half of the twentieth century. After studying at the Montreal Conservatory (Conservatoire de Musique du Québec à Montréal), he attended workshops at the Marlboro School of Music (Vermont) in the summers of 1950, 1951, and 1953. He lived in Paris from 1954 to 1961, where he enrolled in the piano studio of Yvonne Loriod, took analysis courses with Olivier Messiaen, attended workshops on Ondes Martenot, and received counterpoint lessons with Andrée Vaurabourg-Honegger. Tremblay attended the Darmstadt International Summer Courses in 1957 and 1960, and worked at the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) led by Pierre Schaeffer. Involved at this time with the networks of French new music, he frequently met with Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Iannis Xénakis.

In 1961 Tremblay returned to Quebec and was appointed professor of analysis and composition at the Montreal Conservatory, a position he occupied until his retirement in 1997. His courses at the Conservatory were inspired by Messiaen’s famous analysis class in Paris. Tremblay found connections between master works of Western music that linked the past to the present, from Gregorian chants to the polyphony of Guillaume de Machaut, Monteverdi, and Mozart, through to the twentieth century. His courses were extremely influential to two or three generations of composers in Quebec.
Vicente Emilio Sojo (1887--1974)
Authors: Tovar Roberta Ojeda
Published: September 2018

Vicente Emilio Sojo was born in Guatire, Miranda State, on December 8, 1887, the son of Francisco Reverón and Luisa Sojo. Self-taught composer, conductor, choirmaster and pedagogue, he was also the most influential figure of the first half of the Venezuelan twentieth century. In 1896, he undertook his first music studies with Henrique León (1854-1895) and Régulo Rico (1878-1960). While studying and performing, Sojo had to work as tobacco maker and house painter due to his economic circumstances.

In 1906 Sojo was relocated to Caracas, and in 1909 he auditioned for the School of Music and Declamation (today José Angel Lamas Music School) where he studied solfège, music theory, harmony, composition and cello with Ignacio Bustamante (?–1921), Andrés Delgado Pardo (1870-1940) and Eduardo Richter (1874–1912), respectively. In the meantime, he acted as Choirmaster for the San Francisco Chapel and the Caracas Cathedral. In 1921 he started his teaching activities at the School of Music and Declamation, where he was later appointed as Headmaster in 1936, a position he held until 1964.
Anton Webern (1883−1945)
Authors: Puffett Kathryn Bailey
Published: September 2018

Webern was one of the three principal composers of the Second Viennese School. Probably Arnold Schoenberg’s first private pupil and a devoted lifelong friend, he was one of the founders in 1918, along with Schoenberg and Alban Berg, of the Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna, a society dedicated to the furtherance of the understanding of contemporary music whose concerts were attended by invitation only. He was also an immediate convert to Schoenberg’s twelve-note technique, which was announced in 1923; in fact it is clear that Webern was experimenting with ideas of this sort already in 1911. Webern was destined to become a model in the 1950s for composers such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen and other integral serialists of the Darmstadt school, who eagerly seized upon his strict adherence to twelve-note rows (from 1926 onwards) and his careful organization of rhythm and dynamics, which led to an total serialism in the 1950s and 1960s of which he would almost certainly have despaired. He was also a conductor of considerable merit, though the Second World War more or less put an end to both his conducting career and the performance of his music.
Cather, Willa Siebert (1873–1947)
Authors: Gano Geneva M.
Published: September 2018

Willa Cather was a major U.S. novelist active in the early twentieth century. Cather claimed a wide audience of admirers, including literary critics, writers and artists, and popular readers. Her relationship to modernism, however, is a contested one. Her reverence for the European masters of high culture, her tendency to look ‘backwards’ rather than to the future, and her simple, ‘unfurnished’ style distance her work philosophically and aesthetically from some of the most iconic modernist writers in the Western tradition. However, it must be remembered that modernism developed differentially across time and space; this insight allows us to see Cather as an important representative of the emergence of early modernism within the United States.
Robert Graves
Authors: Barber Claire
Published: September 2018

Robert Graves was a prolific poet and novelist whose career began with the semi-autobiographical Good-bye to All That (1929) but who became famous after the publication and BBC adaptation of I, Claudius (1934). He was not affiliated with a major literary movement, though many of his works, such as ‘In Broken Images’ (1929), respond to similar modernist concerns as The Waste Land (1922). He had little regard for poets like Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats, despite the interest in mythology that he shared with Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and H. D. He was a careful formal craftsman concerned with revision and the preservation of traditional forms, such as the Welsh cynghanedd. Both love and war figure prominently throughout his poetry and prose, particularly in his myth of the White Goddess.
Lewis, (Percy) Wyndham 1882–1957
Authors: Edwards Paul
Published: September 2018

Wyndham Lewis is best known as the leader of Vorticism, due largely to his First World War paintings and the portraits he produced during the 1920s and 1930s. As well as editing the Vorticist magazine, Blast, he wrote forty books, including the novels Tarr (1918) and The Apes of God (1930), both satirical depictions of the art worlds of Paris and London. He wrote extensively on art and its cultural function in such books as The Caliph’s Design: Architects! Where is your Vortex? (1919) and Time and Western Man (1927). Until around 1922, Lewis was considered by many to be the most advanced artist working in Britain.
Ridge, Lola (1873–1941)
Authors: Svoboda Terese
Published: September 2018

A proletarian modernist, the poet Lola Ridge is best known for her work published between 1918 and 1922, which coincided with her editorship of Broom and Others. She is also known for her salon in New York that hosted most of the leading poets of the time, including Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Hart Crane. Four years before Eliot's bleak and anti-Semitic ‘The Waste Land’, her equally long poem ‘The Ghetto’ celebrated the ‘otherness’ of the Jewish Lower East Side, chronicling an era and prophesying the multi-ethnic world of the twenty-first century. She was one of the first to delineate the life of the poor in Manhattan and, in particular, women’s lives in New York City. The title poem of her second book, Sun-up and Other Poems is a striking modernist depiction of child's interior life. Harriet Monroe, founder of Poetry, and William Rose Benet, founder of Saturday Review of Literature, called Ridge a genius. Her poem ‘Brooklyn Bridge’ greatly influenced Hart Crane, and her late work shared Crane's concerns with archaic language and mysticism. Her 1919 speech, ‘Woman and the Creative Will’, anticipated Virginia Woolf's A Room of Her Own by 10 years.
Stream of Consciousness
Authors: Hu Jane
Published: September 2018

The term ‘stream of consciousness’ was first coined by psychologist William James in The Principles of Psychology in 1893, when he describes it thusly: "consciousness as an uninterrupted ‘flow’: ‘a ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let’s call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life" (243). The term quickly came to mean a narrative mode that seeks to give the written equivalent of a character’s thought processes, and is sometimes described in terms of an ‘interior monologue’. As such, it differs from the ‘dramatic monologue’ or ‘soliloquy’ where the speaker addresses the audience or an implied receiver. Stream of consciousness style is often identified by fictional techniques such as lack of punctuation, long and sometimes agrammatical sentences, and a series of unrelated impressions. Stream of consciousness technique tries to represent a character’s general mental state before it is condensed, organized, or edited down into narrative coherence or sense. While stream of consciousness is often read as an avant-garde technique, its aims were to get closer to the ‘reality’ of human thought processes. As a narrative technique, stream of consciousness maintains affiliations with other modernist art forms, such as the visual art of German expressionism, Cubism, and modernist film.
Neo-Primitivism
Authors: Parton Anthony
Published: September 2018

Neo-Primitivism is a style-label employed by the Muscovite avant-garde in the early twentieth century to describe forms of visual art and poetry that were tendentiously crude in style and socially and politically contentious in terms of subject matter. In the field of painting, the style was chiefly developed by Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964) and Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962) as well as by members of the Donkey’s Tail and Target groups, of which they were the respective leaders. In poetry, Neo-Primitivism was most consistently explored by Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922) and Alexei Kruchenykh (1886–1968), with whom the painters frequently collaborated. Neo-Primitivism was not only oppositional to the polite and refined culture of the status-quo, but it was also intensely nationalistic, seeing itself as the inheritor of indigenous artistic practices that had been erased under the Westernizing reforms of Peter the Great. Whilst initially inspired by Western avant-garde Modernism, the neo-primitives quickly disassociated themselves from Western practices to find inspiration in the soil of Russia. Their aim was to reinvigorate Russian art by reference to the expressive qualities of icon painitng, the lubok (Russian woodcut print), peasant embroidery, the painted tray and signboard, and the ancient Russian fertility statues found in the steppe landscape.
Bang, Herman (1857–1912)
Authors: Gunn Olivia
Published: September 2018

Herman Joachim Bang was a Danish author, journalist, lecturer and theater director. He was born on the island of Als near the site of the Danish defeat by Prussian forces in 1864 (Second Schleswig War). In the introduction to his novel, Tine (1889), he cites as formative for his writing the experience of the war and the sound of the Danish troops’ retreat.
Clouts, Sydney (1926–1982)
Authors: Wylie Dan
Published: September 2018

Sydney Clouts was perhaps the most modernist South African poet of his generation. Though his published oeuvre, including a single published volume (One Life [1966]), he was highly regarded in poetic circles; he won both the Ingrid Jonker Prize and the Olive Schreiner Prize for poetry in 1968.
Mauriac, François (1885–1970)
Authors: Vial Caroline
Published: September 2018

François Mauriac was a French novelist, essayist, poet, playwright and journalist. He was born in Bordeaux, France. He is best known for depicting trenchant psychological dramas and Christian characters struggling with a modern world. His widowed mother raised him with a stern, Catholic austerity that profoundly marked his literary works. His stories are typically set in his native Bordeaux and the Landes department in the southwest of France.
Garnett, Constance (1861–1946)
Authors: Winter Caroline
Published: September 2018

Constance Clara Garnett was an English translator of Russian literature and the first to translate the works of Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) into English.
Jolas, Maria (1893–1987)
Authors: Setz Cathryn
Published: September 2018

Maria Jolas was the silent editorial partner in and founder of Transition, the American expatriate magazine published in Paris, The Hague and New York between 1927 and 1938 together with her husband, Eugene Jolas. Although she effectively ran the operation, offering guidance, acumen, translation and contacts, in subsequent interviews she frequently played down her involvement. Born Maria McDonald in Louisville, Kentucky, Maria Jolas moved to Paris after her marriage in 1926. Within a year, the couple set up the magazine, with official co-editorship from Elliot Paul (1891–1958) and others later in its run. Jolas deliberately left her name off the masthead, however.
The Lost Generation
Authors: McKee Adam R.
Published: September 2018

The Lost Generation is a group of expatriate American writers who came of age during World War I and who subsequently became prominent literary figures. The term can also be used to refer to the whole of the post-World War I generation. The term was coined by Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) in a comment to Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) in which she declared, ‘You are all a lost generation’. Hemingway subsequently used this phrase as an epigraph to his novel The Sun also Rises (1926), which is often seen as emblematic of the Lost Generation’s literary tradition.
Martí, José (1853–1885)
Authors: Rodríguez Drissi Susannah
Published: September 2018

José Martí was a poet, journalist, translator and Cuban patriot, who dedicated his life to Latin American independence. In 1895, he died in a failed attempt to liberate Cuba from Spanish colonial rule.
The New Age
Authors: Kane Louise
Published: September 2018

The New Age was a weekly British literary magazine published from 1894 to 1938. Established by Frederick A. Atkins (1864–1940) in October 1894, the New Age originally existed as ‘A Weekly Record of Christian Culture, Social Service, and Literary Life’. After brief editorial stints by A. E. Fletcher (1841–1915) and Arthur Compton-Rickett (1869–1937), Joseph Clayton (1868–1943) edited the magazine from 1898 to 1907.
Saint-John Perse (1887–1975)
Authors: Rigolot Carol
Published: September 2018

Recipient of the 1960 Nobel Prize for Literature, poet-diplomat Saint-John Perse (Alexis Leger) moved to France after a childhood in Guadeloupe and immediately began writing about his lost Eden. These Eloges (Praises, 1911) still feel modern in their kaleidoscopic juxtaposition of images and sensations. Posted in China during World War I, he wrote his masterpiece, Anabase (Anabasis), about the founding of a city. T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) loved this poem, translated it in 1924 and subsequently put it on the Anglo-American literary map. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) and Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888–1970) made it famous throughout Europe.
Southern Agrarians
Authors: LeRoy Jenny
Published: September 2018

The Southern Agrarians were twelve writers from the American South who advocated a return to an agrarian-based economy throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In their 1930 collection of essays I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974), Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) and others attacked the system of modern industrial capitalism and its effect on the traditional way of Southern life.
Watson, Stephen (1954–2011)
Authors: Meihuizen Nicholas
Published: September 2018

Born in Cape Town, Stephen Watson taught in the English Department and the Centre for Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town. He was the author of six poetry collections, notably In this City (1986), which is centred in Cape Town (as is most of his poetry), and Return of the Moon: Versions from the /Xam (1991), which is based on the Bleek and Lloyd translations of Bushmen folklore. His nonfictional works include the acclaimed collection of finely crafted essays The Music in the Ice (2010).
Wicomb, Zoë (1948—)
Authors: Whittington Ian
Published: September 2018

Novelist, short-story writer and essayist Zoë Wicomb was born in Namaqualand, South Africa. Much of her fiction and criticism deals with the construction of racial identity in South Africa. Under the Apartheid system, Wicomb and her family were considered ‘coloured’, the label applied to, among others, persons of mixed racial background.
Ennui
Authors: Gesa Frömming
Published: September 2018

Ennui (French, from Lat. in odio esse, to be an object of hate) is an existential form of boredom, a weary state of constant disaffectedness with oneself and the world, associated with a profound loss of meaning.
Lukács, György (1885–1971)
Authors: Perlea Georgiana
Published: September 2018

György Lukács was a Hungarian philosopher and literary critic. Born into a wealthy Jewish family, he spent his youth in Berlin and Vienna studying German philosophy. As a Marxist revolutionary, he was involved in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919). After writing Theory of the Novel (1920), a noted essay inspired by the work of G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), Lukács published History and Class Consciousness (1923), which countered the deterministic Marxism that was typical of the Second International with a neo-Hegelian view of the proletarian revolution.
Scholem, Gershom (1897–1982)
Authors: Seagrave Jennifer Large
Published: September 2018

Gershom Scholem was born in Berlin to Arthur and Betty Hirsch Scholem. Though raised in an assimilated Jewish and German nationalist household, Gerhard Scholem grew to espouse Zionism and, at the age of twenty-five, immigrated to Palestine in 1923, where he changed his name to Gershom. There, he became a librarian at the National Library, which would later become part of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He became the twentieth century’s greatest Jewish historian and scholar of Jewish mysticism, known as Kabbala, and a member of the prominent group of German-Jewish intellectuals living in Palestine between the World Wars.
Shakespeare and Company
Authors: Gammel Irene
Published: September 2018

Shakespeare and Company is the legendary English-language lending library and bookstore in Paris, which was founded in 1919 by Sylvia Beach (1887–1962). The shop opened at 8 rue Dupuytren but later relocated to 12 rue de l’Odéon in 1921 opposite the shop of Beach’s long-time business and personal partner, Adrienne Monnier (1892–1955). Shakespeare and Company operated until Beach was taken prisoner in 1941 during the German occupation of France; in 1944, Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) participated in liberating the store.
Spengler, Oswald (1880–1936)
Authors: Peterson Paul Silas
Published: September 2018

Oswald Spengler was a prominent historian in the Weimar Republic (1918–1933). From 1908 to 1911, he worked as a high school teacher in Hamburg. Thereafter he worked as an independent author in Munich. His The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1918, 1922) provided an important impetus for cultural analysis in the 1920s and 1930s in Germany.
Stephen, Leslie (1832–1904)
Authors: Keese Andrew
Published: September 2018

Leslie Stephen was an English author and editor who contributed significantly to the science-religion debate in the latter part of the Victorian period. Father of modernist author Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) and artist Vanessa Bell (1879–1961), he was a long-time editor of the popular literary periodical Cornhill Magazine and the Dictionary of National Biography. He was also a noted mountaineer, having served as president of the Alpine Club and editor of the Alpine Journal.
Weaver, Harriet Shaw (1876–1961)
Authors: Creasy Matthew
Published: September 2018

Harriet Shaw Weaver was a political activist and magazine editor best remembered for her literary and financial support of the modernist writer James Joyce (1882–1941). Born into a wealthy family with roots in the cotton industry, Harriet Shaw Weaver turned first to social work. An interest in women’s suffrage led to her involvement with the New Freewoman, and from 1911 she devoted her inherited wealth to sponsoring the arts, gradually becoming a major patron and publisher of Modernism. In 1913, she became the business manager of the New Freewoman, taking over from Dora Marsden (1882–1960) as editor when it became The Egoist. Her financial support was crucial to the success of this literary periodical, which published almost every significant name in Modernism, including T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), Ezra Pound (1885–1972), James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) and Marianne Moore (1887–1972), but only sold two hundred copies between 1916 and 1919.
Weininger, Otto (1880–1903)
Authors: Laville Claire
Published: September 2018

Otto Weininger was an Austrian philosopher and racial theorist. Born in Vienna to Jewish parents, he committed suicide five months after the publication of Sex and Character (1903; English trans., 1906), which was based on his doctoral dissertation.
Barraine, Elsa Jacqueline (1910–99)
Authors: Hamer Laura
Published: September 2018

Elsa Barraine’s precocious musical talents were recognized at an early age, and she entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of twelve. She studied composition with Paul Dukas, harmony with Jean Gallon, fugue with Georges Caussade, and accompaniment with André Estyle. She won the Prix de Rome in 1929. Between 1936 and 1940, and again after the Second World War until 1948, Barraine worked for Radio France. She was active within the French struggle against the Occupation, during the war, by co-founding the Front national des musiciens pour la liberté et l’indépendance de la France, with Roger Désormière and Louis Durey. She was appointed to the teaching staff of the Paris Conservatoire in 1952, working as a professor of sight-reading until 1969, and then as a professor of analysis. Barraine’s compositional process was intricately bound up with her personal humanistic and humanitarian beliefs, and reactions to the tumultuous upheavals of the twentieth century. Despite its raw emotional context, her music (with the exception of the serial Musique rituelle, 1966/67) is essentially tonal and cast within vigorous formal structures. She is recognized as one of the leading French composers of the twentieth century.
Baudelaire, Charles (1821–67)
Authors: De Rosnay Emile
Published: September 2018

Charles Baudelaire is a pivotal figure of modernist aesthetics. His contributions to poetry, the prose poem and criticism, as well as his focus on urban modernity and the psychological consequences of industrialization, have had an undeniable impact on modernism. He is amongst the first to have connected historical modernity to aesthetic modernity, in works such as Les Fleurs du mal, Spleen de Paris (Petits poèmes en prose), and Le Peintre de la vie moderne.
Bennington School of the Dance (1934–42)
Authors: Feck M. Candace
Published: September 2018

Bennington School of the Dance served as a highly influential training programme, creative laboratory and performance venue for early modern dance. Founded by Martha Hill, Mary Josephine Shelly and Bennington College President Robert Devore Leigh in 1934 on the college campus in south-western Vermont, the school thrived over nine, six-week summer sessions from 1934 to 1942, including one term held at Mills College in California in 1939. Designed to promote and consolidate knowledge of the nascent art form of American modern dance, the Bennington School also became an incubator for the production and presentation of new works by modern dance’s most distinguished exponents: choreographers Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman and Hanya Holm were among its earliest and most consistent faculty members. Dance critic John Martin, composer and advisor Louis Horst, and stage and lighting designer Arch Lauterer were also important faculty members. The programme’s guiding philosophy proposed that to be viable, a dance education must be associated with exposure to its best artists, sharply distinguishing itself from the competing model formulated by Margaret H’Doubler at the University of Wisconsin, where the study of dance was viewed as an educational end in itself. The Bennington School gave way to the Connecticut College School of Dance and eventually the American Dance Festival.
Ouvroir de literature potentielle (Oulipo) [Workshop of potential literature]
Authors: Lapprand Marc Didier
Published: September 2018

Oulipo, Ouvroir de littérature potentielle [Workshop of potential literature] is a dynamic and even flamboyant group of writers, poets, and mathematicians who strive to elaborate new constraints, which they employ in order to explore and enhance the potentiality of language. Oulipo was born in 1960 thanks to the union of two complementary minds: that of François Le Lionnais (1901–1984), a mathematician and renowned chess specialist, and that of Raymond Queneau (1903–1976), a famed novelist and poet. The group, now over 30 strong, gives public readings, facilitates writing workshops, and participates in many other public events, including radio programs on France-Culture. One of the key factors of the group’s unequalled longevity is precisely that Oulipo is not an avant-garde assigned to topple previous domineering currents. The most celebrated Oulipians, other than the two founding members, are Georges Perec (1936–1982), Jacques Roubaud (1932--) and Jacques Jouet (1947--). Other icons include Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) and Italo Calvino (1923–1985).
Blanchot, Maurice (1907–2003)
Authors: Caruana John
Published: September 2018

Maurice Blanchot was one of Europe’s most influential essayists, theorists and experimental fiction writers. Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, notably, represent the major theorists of the second half of the last century who are indebted to Blanchot’s highly original – if not enigmatic – oeuvre. Throughout his life, Blanchot sought to minimize his status as a public figure and at times isolated himself from friends and colleagues. Blanchot’s modernism emphasizes the radical singularity of the artist’s production: the work of art completely thwarts all attempts to subsume it according to some pre-established universal category or identity. For Blanchot, écriture – art in its most indeterminate form – is an expression not of an author who actively and deliberately conceives and creates; rather, it is a reflection of an experience of radical passivity, the futile and always incomplete struggle with mortal existence. The work of art abandons the artist, the poet, the writer, to a state of permanent dislocation and exile. The nomadic nature of the artist’s experience testifies – in accentuated form – to the subject in general. Blanchot speaks famously of la communauté inavouable – the unavow-able or unworkable character of the community that is to come. Though this idea might suggest paralysis, it also speaks to the futility of all totalitarian aspirations. The radical heterogeneity of existence entails the inexhaustibility of humanity’s personal, social and political endeavours.
Brahm, Otto (1856–1912)
Authors: Ifkovits Kurt
Published: September 2018

Otto Brahm (Otto Abrahamson) (1856–1912) was a German literary historian, critic, dramaturge, theatre manager and editor. After studying German literature in Berlin, Brahm became an influential theatre critic and proponent of naturalism, championing Ibsen’s works in particular. In 1889 he co-founded the Freie Bühne company in Berlin, as well as a journal of the same name in 1890. Brahm was its editor-in-chief for four years. Freie Bühne was initially conducted as a private theatre society to skirt censorship laws. As its dramaturge, Brahm was involved in many path-breaking productions (e.g., Ibsen’s Ghosts) that would make theatre history and lead to the breakthrough of theatrical naturalism in Germany. Brahm was also an advocate of Gerhart Hauptmann, paving the way for the premieres of Die Weber (The Weavers) and Vor Sonnenaufgang (Before Dawn). In 1894 he took over leadership of the Neues Theater in Berlin, and from 1904 he was at the helm of the Lessing-Theater. His acting ensemble was among the finest in Germany and eventually included the young Max Reinhardt. By banishing pathos from the stage, espousing instead a stark psychological realism, Brahm can be considered—as the critic Alfred Kerr dubbed him—the ‘the true architect of a European stage.’
Bresson, Robert (1901–99)
Authors: Ionita Maria
Published: September 2018

Robert Bresson was a film director and one of the most important representatives of French cinema. His work with its stark, austere style and focus on moral and theological themes has often been compared that of Dostoyevsky. His films have been a major influence on the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, Paul Schrader and Michael Haneke.
Van Gogh, Vincent Willem (1853–1890)
Authors: Slavkin Mary
Published: September 2018

Vincent van Gogh is considered one of the most important artists of Symbolism or Post-Impressionism. In his most typical works, van Gogh generally uses heightened colors, visible brushstrokes – often with thick impasto, outlined forms, and distorted perspective. He often included religious elements or themes and focused on the lower classes.
Durkheim, Émile (1858–1917)
Authors: Paravantes A. J.
Published: September 2018

David Émile Durkheim was a founding figure of sociology in France. His conceptual development of the "division of labour" (1893) remains key to a sociological understanding of modernity; in social terms, the highly-divided "organic" solidarity of modern nations and industrial society stood against the simplified "mechanical" solidarity of traditional communities.
Fin de siècle
Authors: Martens David
Published: September 2018

Referring to the end of the 19th century, Fin de siècle not only represents a specific historical moment but also a part of the sensibility and of the cultural production of the period. It is particularly challenging to define fin de siècle within the artistic world, as it neither corresponds to a movement around a leading figure, nor to an amalgamation of shared and promulgated aesthetic principles (there is no manifesto laying claim to fin-de-sièclism).

The term appears for the first time at the end of the 1880s. In its French form, it has imposed itself ever since on most Western-European languages (e.g., English, German). Fin de siècle crystalizes certain anxieties that are typical of this era: the period is characterized by a particular striving for modernity, while at the same time it is also perceived as an end. This explains why the fin de siècle mentality has often been closely related to decadence (or decadentism) to which it is, however, not limited: symbolism, aestheticism or even art nouveau all fall within fin de siècle.

The fin de siècle mind-set is marked by an ensemble of shared features, in particular an ambivalent fear for the end.
Cravan, Arthur (1887–1918)
Authors: Rhodes Evan
Published: September 2018

Born Fabian Avernius Lloyd in Lausanne, Switzerland to expatriate English parents, Arthur Cravan was a self-styled ‘poet-pugilist,’ nephew of Oscar Wilde, and husband of British poet Mina Loy. Cravan’s literary legacy is largely constituted by his connection to avant-garde circles in both Paris and New York, and the way that his anti-art position offered an aesthetic model for Dada and surrealism. Cravan published the journal Maintenant in Paris from 1912–1915, which in its indiscriminate combativeness toward other artists and writers represents what Roger Shattuck called ‘a literary transposition of boxing technique.’ Cravan’s pugnacious persona drew on his formal training as a boxer, exalting viscerality and violence against the putative effeteness of artistic convention: ‘if you have the good fortune to be a brute you’ve got to keep being one’. In this regard, Cravan was particularly influenced by contemporaneous African-American heavyweight Jack Johnson, a recurrent figure in his writing often portrayed as ‘primitive’ or ‘brutal.’ In 1915, Cravan and Johnson staged a boxing match in Barcelona attended by avant-gardists such as Francis Picabia and Blaise Cendrars, which Johnson won. By 1916, Cravan had moved to New York, where he met Loy, and had taken up with members of the Arensberg Circle. His combination of an anti-art stance and penchant for spectacle made him an important precursor for Dada and surrealism; Cendrars once wrote that ‘Dada is Dada and Arthur Cravan is its prophet.’ In 1918, Cravan vanished off the coast of Salina Cruz, Mexico in a boat of his own repair.
Page, P. K. (1916–2010)
Authors: Scott Conrad
Published: September 2018

Patricia Kathleen Page described herself as a traveller, and invoked this status through both her poetry (under P. K. Page), and her visual art (under her married name, P. K. Irwin). Her experiences informed her work and changed her understanding of both poetic and artistic production: as she learned the former, she more fully developed the latter. Travel gave her other means with which to satisfy her creative output, but most importantly, travel necessarily made her an observer; perception has been her primary interest from poetry to paint to prose. As she comments in her non-fiction essay ‘A Writer’s Life,’ ‘I believe art has two functions: a lower and a higher. The lower is invaluable. It shows us ourselves — Picasso’s Guernica, for example. The higher — more valuable still, in my view — gives us glimpses of another order’. Alternatively a poet, writer, and artist (and prolific on all counts), P. K. displayed a supremely imagistic and visual quality that underlines her devotion to observing the world in new ways and to self-reflection. Page has had her written work published in over three dozen books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction (including children’s literature), and has had her visual art collected in several permanent collections in Canada — including those of the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939)
Authors: Sherman Louis A.
Published: September 2018

Sigmund (Sigismund Schlomo) Freud was an Austrian psychiatrist and the founder of psychoanalysis, who systematized theories of the unconscious and psychosexual development. Freud published case studies, lectures and papers on technique – along with works of self-analysis, speculative biography, cultural anthropology, and art and cultural criticism.
Gyre
Authors: Barber Claire
Published: September 2018

The term "gyre" describes the spiral motion of matter that widens and narrows as it moves around an axis. Also represented as a vortex, a gyre constantly expands or contracts based on its interaction with other matter. Before the modernist period, gyres appear in philosophical and literary texts by Dante Alighieri, Emanuel Swedenborg, and William Blake, among others. This figure emerges most prominently in modernism among the works of W. B. Yeats – particularly, "The Second Coming" (1920), "The Gyres" (1938), and A Vision (1925).
National Socialism and Fascism
Authors: Hexham Irving
Published: September 2018

To appreciate that the various forms of fascism, particularly German National Socialism under Adolf Hitler’s Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP, National Socialist German Workers' Party commonly known as the Nazi Party; 1920–1945) and Italian Fascism under Benito Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF, National Fascist Party; 1922–1943), are embedded within modernism, one must first recognize that the reality and horror of the Holocaust has distorted our understanding of Nazism in three significant ways. First, until at least the early 1990s the crude anti-Semitism of National Socialists like Julius Streicher (1885–1946) and Johann van Leers (1902–1965) prevented scholars from taking seriously the notion that National Socialism is an ideology that intellectuals helped define. Secondly, because anti-Semitism did not obviously manifest itself among Italian modernists and fascists, it discouraged comparison. Thirdly, starting in the 1950s many surviving National Socialists, who were formerly passionate SS-intellectuals like Sigrid Hunke (1913–1999) (Poewe 2011) or like the head of the Press Division of Ribbentrop’s Foreign Office Paul Karl Schmidt (1911–1997) (Plöger 2009), among many others, reinvented themselves.
Orientalism
Authors: Higgins Katherine
Published: September 2018

Orientalism is the sociological, historical, cultural, and anthropological study of the Orient, with "the Orient" constituting countries East of "the Occident" (Western Europe), and including lands spanning from Morocco to Japan. The term Orientalism, however, is primarily used to describe the incorporation of Eastern culture in Western art, literature, and design during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Artists whose work largely focused on Oriental subjects are often referred to as the Orientalists, and include Eugène Delacroix, Alphonse Etienne Dinet, Jean-Léon Gérôme, William Holman-Hunt, John Frederick Lewis, and the photographers Lehnert and Landrock. Traces of Oriental themes can also be found in the work of 20th-century artists including Henri Matisse, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Wassily Kandinsky. Orientalist artists predominantly depicted scenes of the Arabian Desert, portraits of natives with Oriental artefacts and clothing, the harem, odalisques, and Oriental architecture. Broadly speaking, the Orientalists represented the Orient as primitive yet opulent, and in stark contrast to the "rational" and enlightened West. Much of the scholarship around (and the very definition) of Orientalism in the 20th century is indebted to Said’s Orientalism (1977), which discusses why the West has preconceived notions of the Orient (and primarily the peoples of the Middle East).
Altman, Robert (1925–2006)
Authors: Zenari Vivian
Published: September 2018

Robert Bernard Altman (February 20, 1925, Kansas City, Missouri–November 20, 2006, Los Angeles) was an American director of television, theatre, and, most famously, films, including MASH, Nashville, The Player, and Gosford Park. Altman’s films are characterized by satire, social criticism, fragmented storylines, and indefinite endings.
Brakhage, Stan (1933–2003)
Authors: Ioniţă Maria
Published: September 2018

Stan Brakhage (born Robert Sanders) was an American filmmaker and one of the most important figures of experimental cinema, noted for his abstract, lyrical style. His eclectic body of work ranges from narrative to non-narrative features, animation as well as virtually unclassifiable pieces that combine film with painting and collage. Brakhage is known for his complex techniques such as rapid, rhythmic cutting, multiple exposures, scratching the emulsion, and painting or applying organic materials directly on celluloid.
Renoir, Jean (1894–1979)
Authors: Adriaensens Vito
Published: September 2018

Jean Renoir was a French director and writer responsible for over 40 films from the silent period to 1970. He was born in Paris as the second son of famous Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and studied philosophy and mathematics at university. Uncertain about his future, Renoir enlisted in the army with his brother Pierre, and both were severely wounded in the Great War.