bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
BLAST (1914–1915)
Authors: Waddell Nathan
Published: September 2018

BLAST was an early modernist ‘little magazine’ edited by Wyndham Lewis in London. Not to be confused with Alexander Berkman’s San Francisco-based anarchist newspaper The Blast (1916–17), BLAST proclaimed the arrival of the English avant-garde movement Vorticism. BLAST ran for two volumes, appearing in July 1914 and July 1915, before the First World War forced it to end. The magazine’s two instalments represent a key example of pre-war avant-garde periodical culture, and are recognised as exemplifying, through the differing commitments of their various contributors, some of the overlapping alliances and antagonisms of London’s early modernist socio-cultural scene. Key contributions include Lewis’s play Enemy of the Stars (1914) and stories by Ford Madox Ford (‘The Saddest Story’, 1914) and Rebecca West (‘Indissoluble Matrimony’, 1914). In promoting Vorticism, BLAST championed an intellectual aesthetic based on contemplative detachment and foregrounded inter-subjective relations. Both volumes of BLAST were heavily illustrated, featuring visual contributions from Jessie Dismorr, Jacob Epstein, Frederick Etchells, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Spencer Gore, Cuthbert Hamilton, Jacob Kramer, Lewis himself, C. R. W. Nevinson, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, Dorothy Shakespear, and Edward Wadsworth.
Boas, Franz (1858–1942)
Authors: Greenberg Erik
Published: September 2018

Franz Boas was a founder of the fields of modern anthropology and ethnography. He created the anthropology department at Boston’s Clark University and oversaw the creation of Columbia University’s PhD in anthropology. He also held curatorial posts at the Field Museum in Chicago and at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Boychukysty
Authors: Kochman Adrienne
Published: September 2018

The Boychukysty were followers of the Ukrainian monumental painter Mikhajlo Lvovych Boychuk (1882–1937), who advocated a national Ukrainian artistic school drawn from Byzantine, Ukrainian mediaeval, and early Italian Renaissance sources. They included Ivan Padalka (1894–1937); Vasyl Sedlyar (1889–1937); Ivan Lypkivsky; Oksana Pavlenko (1895–1991); Antonina Ivanova; Manuil Shekhtman (1900–1941); Mykola Rokytsky (1901–1944); his wife, Sofiya A. Nalepinska (1884–1937); his brother, Tymofil Boychuk (1896–1922), and others.

Mikhajlo Boychuk was born in Romanivka, now in Ternopil Province in Western Ukraine. He studied at the Kraków Academy of Arts from 1900 to 1904, followed by several months at the Munich Academy of Arts in 1905, under the sponsorship of the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky (1865–1944). Sheptytsky, an ardent supporter of the arts in Ukraine, funded the education of numerous artists from Galicia to study in Munich and Paris. Boychuk’s education was interrupted by conscription into the Austro-Hungarian army in late 1905, where he served for one year. In early 1907, he moved to Paris to continue his studies, first at the Vitti Academy, then at the Academy Ranson, where he took classes with French Nabis painter Paul Serusier (1864–1927), a professor there. While in Paris, Boychuk met his future wife Sofiya Nalepinska, and other artists, among them Mykola Kasperovych (1885–1938), Sophie Segno (1890–1971), and Sophie Baudouin de Courtenay (1887–1967), who shared a similar passion for Byzantine and Early Renaissance art.
Brasch, (Orwell) Charles (1909–1973)
Authors: Hall Molly
Published: September 2018

Charles Brasch was a New Zealand poet, critic, editor, and translator. Primarily informed by national identity and history, his work focused on finding rootedness in the landscape of New Zealand for its European settlers. He is best known for his mid-to-late career poetry: The Estate, and Other Poems (1957), Ambulando: Poems (1964), and Not Far Off: Poems (1969). He was the founder and long-time editor of the leading literary journal, Landfall, and was both a well-known trendsetter in, and patron of, the New Zealand Arts. Though he felt strongly connected to England, a country he spent much of his time in, he made his most significant literary contributions at home. On 20 May 1973 Brasch passed away after a battle with Hodgkin’s disease in the town of his birth, Dunedin, New Zealand.
Brenner, Yosef Hayim (1881–1921)
Authors: Weininger Melissa
Published: September 2018

Yosef Hayim Brenner was born in 1881 in Novi Mlini, in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine). Like many Hebrew and Yiddish writers of his generation, he received a traditional religious education but later rejected his religious training. As a young man, Brenner migrated to urban cultural centres, including London. Brenner’s own brand of modernism was characterized by formal as well as thematic elements. Formally, Brenner’s fiction mirrored the disintegration of modern life in its circularity and fragmentation. Brenner himself linked what he called the ‘brokenness’ of reality with the formal brokenness of narrative in modernist fiction like his own. This fragmentation of the narrative reflected the existential alienation of many of his characters, who were trying to find their place in the chaos of modern life.
Breton, André (1896–1966)
Authors: Cunningham Anne
Published: September 2018

André Breton was a French poet, writer, editor and critic. He is best known as one of the key founders of Surrealism. Breton published the Le Manifeste du Surréalisme (The Manifesto of Surrealism) in 1924, announcing the central theme of the pre-eminence of the irrational and the automatic over logic and reason, encouraging free expression and the release of the subconscious mind in an effort to reject and overthrow social and moral conventions. Influenced by Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious, Surrealism sought to blur the distinctions between dream and reality, reason and madness, objectivity and subjectivity. Breton was a strict disciplinarian within the movement, expelling many members, and was nicknamed ‘The Pope of Surrealism.’ Breton’s other well known works of fiction include Nadja (1928) and L’Amour fou (1937—Mad Love). During World War II, Breton’s writing was banned by the Vichy government, and he fled France until 1946 when he returned to Paris. He was an avid collector of modern art, ethnographic materials, and unusual objects. His collection of over 5,300 pieces was open to researchers at his Paris apartment after his death in 1966 until 2003, but was closed after attempts to form a surrealist foundation failed, and his collection was auctioned off. A wall of his apartment is preserved today at the Centre Georges Pompidou.
Droubi, Hafidh al- (1914–1991)
Authors: Floyd Tiffany Renee
Published: September 2018

Considered an important figure in the development of art education in Iraq, Hafidh al-Droubi held important posts during his career including the Deanship of the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad and the Chair of the Society of Iraqi Plastic Art, he was also a prolific painter who experimented with various modes of representation. As a leading artist of the pioneer generation, Al-Droubi was one of the first Iraqi artists to study art abroad, first at the Accademia Reale in Rome and then at Goldsmiths College in London. He also instituted Iraq’s first free art studio, which gave young artists a space to practice and interact, an idea that eventually grew into a network of successful ateliers.

Al-Droubi was a founding member of Iraq’s first official art group, the Society of the Friends of Art, established in 1941. The painter also founded his own artist collective, the Impressionists, in 1953, which better served his own pedagogical concerns. Largely made up of Al-Droubi’s students, the Impressionists worked toward a shared attitude about art education rather than a specific style. Al-Droubi was an active exhibitor, showing works in almost all major shows held by the Society of the Friends of Art and the Impressionists, also participating in international exhibitions both in Europe and around the Arab world. He was honored at the 1972 Al-Wasiti Festival, one of only a few artists to garner special recognition.
Finnegans Wake
Authors: Creasy Matthew
Published: September 2018

An experimental masterpiece by James Joyce, published in 1939. Joyce began writing it during 1923 and parts of it appeared under the title Work-in-Progress within literary periodicals, such as transition, and in pamphlet form. It has a reputation as the most difficult text of literary modernism.

Joyce set out to write "a history of the world" and much of the structure of the book derives from Italian philosopher and historian Giambatista Vico’s New Science (1725), which breaks down history into a series of cyclic phases. The final title, however, alludes to a Dublin street ballad about a builder who falls from a ladder: Tim Finnegan is aroused from unconsciousness when a drop of whisky touches his mouth during the wake organized by his family, who think him dead. Joyce used this to allude to Viconian myths of fall and redemption or resurrection. It was written during the early years of Irish independence and the Wake’s mythic re-cycling of history and literature also bears upon contemporary developments. The absence of apostrophe in the title is deliberate: although derived from "Finnegan’s Wake," it also urges the Irish (Finnegans) to rise from their historical stupor.
Goldberg, Leah (1911–1970)
Authors: Schachter Allison
Published: September 2018

Leah Goldberg (1911–70) was a prolific modernist poet, novelist, playwright, translator, and literary critic. Born in Königsberg, Germany, Goldberg grew up in the Russian-speaking milieu of Kovno. Her early education was in Russian and German and she read widely in both languages. During World War I the family fled Kovno. Upon their return in 1918 Goldberg’s parents enrolled her in the Hebrew gymnasium and there she studied Hebrew and language and literature. In 1931 she traveled to Germany to begin graduate work in Semitic Studies in Berlin and later in Bonn, where she completed her doctorate. In Germany, Goldberg witnessed the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi rise to power—two historical events that haunt her work. In 1935, Goldberg immigrated to Mandatory Palestine and found a place for herself as a prominent member of the Moderna, a group of Hebrew modernist poets that included Avraham Shlonsky and Nathan Alterman, quickly establishing herself as an important intellectual and cultural figure of her generation. She played this role not only as a poet and writer, but also as a scholar. Goldberg taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she founded the Department of Comparative Literature.
Hausmann, Raoul (1886–1971)
Authors: Matheny Lynn Kellmanson
Published: September 2018

Raoul Hausmann, the "Dadasoph," was an active participant in the Dada movement in Berlin, authoring key manifestos, co-founding Club Dada, editing journals, and co-organizing the First International Dada Fair. He declared that Dada was "the only legitimate means of visual communication" and argued that "everyone who liberates his innermost tendency is Dadaist," (Huelsenbeck 1993: 49). Arguably Hausmann’s most lasting impact on modernism is his development of the medium of photomontage. Hausmann saw the cutting and pasting of photographs as a movement away from the traditional materials of art and role of the artist. Pictures culled from mass cultural sources became the raw material for biting social critiques. By repurposing images from popular culture, Hausmann exposed their artificiality and challenged viewers’ assumption that photographs—and the ideologies behind them—are truthful.
Il’f, Il’ia Arnol’dovich and Petrov, Evgeny Petrovich
Authors: Fisher Anne O.
Published: September 2018

The writing duo collectively known as "Il’f and Petrov" is best known for two early Soviet satirical novels featuring the wisecracking con artist Ostap Bender, The Twelve Chairs (Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev, 1928) and The Little Golden Calf (Zolotoi telenok, 1931). They also collaborated on screenplays, short stories, essays, novellas, newspaper columns, and an American travelogue, as well as publishing individually. Both the Russian Orthodox Petrov and the Jewish Il’f were born and raised in the cosmopolitan port city of Odessa, renowned for its humor and vibrant Jewish culture. After enduring World War I and civil war in "hungry Odessa," both moved independently to Moscow in 1923 and wrote for humorous publications, including the newspaper Gudok (The Steam Whistle) along with Petrov’s brother Valentin Kataev, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Yuri Olesha. After the success of their Bender novels, they started writing for Pravda in 1932, which sent them to travel the United States by car in the winter of 1935–6, resulting in the travelogue One-Story America (Odnoetazhnaia Amerika, 1937). Their art’s ironic quotation and ambivalent intertextuality deeply influenced Russian everyday and literary language. Il’f died in Moscow in 1937 of tuberculosis. Petrov continued to write and became a war correspondent during World War II; he died in a plane crash outside Sevastopol in 1942.
Jellett, Mainie (Mary Harriet) (1897–1944)
Authors: Barber Fionna
Published: September 2018

Mainie Jellett was the most important of a remarkable generation of Anglo-Irish women artists studying in Paris after World War I. She is credited with the introduction of modernist painting to Ireland.
Jung, Carl (1875–1961)
Authors: Sherman Louis A.
Published: September 2018

Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and an early leader in the psychoanalytic movement, which he left to found analytical psychology. Heir-apparent to Sigmund Freud, Jung served as the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Their split resulted from the movement’s increasing dogmatism and Jung’s insistence on a broader conception of the libido (in Freud, sexual energy) advanced in his Psychology of the Unconscious (1912). Further, in addition to a personal unconscious, Jung postulated a collective unconscious in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1917), made up of inherited archetypes that emerge into consciousness as symbol and complex. Jung’s therapeutic goal was individuation, in which both the collective and personal unconscious are integrated into the individual’s conscious conception of self. Unlike Freud, Jung considered religion to be compatible with psychology as a potential support for individuation. In addition to works on the occult, alchemy, and the Bible, Jung wrote prefaces to the I Ching, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and D.T. Suzuki’s An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. Jung’s influence spread significantly after World War II, popularized by Joseph Campbell and adapted to literary criticism by Northrop Frye. Jung’s work on psychological types would become the basis for the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator.
Kojève, Alexandre (1902–1968)
Authors: Elmore Jonathan
Published: September 2018

Alexandre Kojève was a French philosopher of Russian birth, most remembered for his introduction of Hegel into French and Continental thought. Kojève’s work on Hegel went far beyond simply exegesis or analysis, unstead constituting a radically original reinterpretation of Hegelian thought, specifically Hegel’s philosophy of history. Kojève’s readings of Hegel draw heavily on Heidegger’s ontology and the materialism of Marx. From Heidegger, Kojève draws temporality into Hegel’s universal process of history, arguing that humanity’s being is fundamentally defined by its temporality. From Marx, he takes the materiality of ontology, seeing history as the succession of that which humanity produces. Kojève’s career began in earnest when he settled in Paris to teach at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. It was there, from 1933 to 1939, that he would teach a seminar on Hegel that, directly and indirectly, influenced so many twentieth-century intellectuals: Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Louis Althusser, Raymond Aron, to name a few. Following World War II, he worked for the French Ministry of Economic Affairs and continued writing philosophy until his death. While he wrote multiple volumes on philosophy and philosophers, many published after his death, his most influential writings were his published lectures on Hegel, appearing in 1947 in French (Introduction à la lecture de Hegel) and later in English as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1969).
Lam, Wifredo (1902–1982)
Authors: Hartman Joseph
Published: September 2018

The work of Cuban artist Wifredo Lam is internationally recognized for its blending of European modernism, especially cubism and surrealism, with the visual culture of Africa and the Caribbean. Lam is most famous for his paintings of mask-like figures and animal–human hybrids arranged in geometrized tropical spaces. These figures often suggest the spirit of orishas, divine beings associated with Santería, a Cuban religion that fuses Catholic saint imagery with the sacred practices of the Yoruba in West Africa. Lam’s hybrid figures engaged and subverted the modernist technique of primitivism—a technique that entails the appropriation of non-Western visual forms regardless of cultural meaning, as in the African mask-like faces of Picasso’s famous painting Les Demoiselles D’ Avignon (1907). With an intimate knowledge of Afro-Cuban cosmologies, Lam asserted that his appropriations embodied a kind of "Trojan Horse"—recombinant visual forms that challenged bourgeois tastes based on Western stereotypes. Lam’s most famous work comes from his time in Cuba, before he settled in Paris in the 1950s. The Jungle, created in 1943 and currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is considered Lam’s masterpiece.
Le Brocquy, Louis (1916–2012)
Authors: Barber Fionna
Published: September 2018

Born in Dublin, Louis le Brocquy became one of the most significant figures in Irish twentieth-century art. After a major role in the organization of the Irish Living Art Exhibition in 1943, he moved to London where he was active in the contemporary art scene.
Camden Town Group
Authors: Furness Tom
Published: September 2018

Founded in 1911 and active in London before World War I, the Camden Town Group played an important role in the development of a distinctively modern British visual art. Its sixteen members promoted modern art’s engagement with a modern world and, in particular, with the minutiae of everyday urban life across a range of characteristic subjects. These subjects included views of street corners, portraits of local girls, shabby bedsit rooms and theatre and music hall interiors, as represented, for example, in Spencer Gore’s The Balcony at the Alhambra (c.1911–1912). The group held only three official exhibitions, all between June 1911 and December 1912 at the Carfax Gallery, London, but the group’s members participated in a great many more contemporaneous events and displays that contributed to the burgeoning British post-impressionist art scene.

A list of members includes: Walter Bayes, Robert Bevan, Harold Gilman, Charles Ginner, Spencer Frederick Gore, Duncan Grant (following Doman Turner’s death in September 1911), James Dickson Innes, Augustus John, Henry Lamb, Wyndham Lewis, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot, James Bolivar Manson, Lucien Pissarro (the son of French Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro), William Ratcliffe, Walter Sickert, and John Doman Turner.
Makerere Art School
Authors: Kyeyune George
Published: September 2018

The Makerere Art School started informally in Mulago, Kampala, Uganda, in 1937, with a handful of students who turned up one evening at the porch of Mrs Margaret Trowell’s house. Trowell was not the first person to teach painting in the region—Mary Fisher, also a Briton, had two years earlier been posted to Gayaza, a girls’ school near Kampala, as an art teacher, and indeed some art classes were being conducted in other missionary schools. But it was Trowell who raised the profile of art education in the region when she convinced the principal of Makerere College to include art among the college’s subjects in 1940. In the years leading to World War I, Makerere was developing into a major institution for higher education in the region. Trowell is also credited for steering the art school during turbulent times when its closure seemed inevitable. For example, when Makerere was considering entering into a special relationship with London University in 1949, Trowell rejected the arrangement, as she feared her art school would lose the African identity she had scrupulously nurtured for over a decade. She directly negotiated with the Slade School (also under the University of London) for a diploma, which ensured that a foreign qualification did not affect the African features of her curriculum.
Mallarmé, Stéphane (Étienne) (1842–1898)
Authors: De Rosnay Emile
Published: September 2018

Along with Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé is a preeminent poet of the latter part of the nineteenth century, notably as the head of Symbolism (with Verlaine). Like many of his generation, Mallarmé built upon Charles Baudelaire’s, Théophile Gautier’s and Edgar Allan Poe’s contributions to poetry and criticism, and anticipated the various Modernist and avant-garde movements to come, being a key voice of modernism. Mallarmé is mostly known for his very difficult, hermetic language, for his conceptualization of a "crisis of verse" (crise de vers), and for his innovations in versification and free verse.

Étienne Mallarmé, commonly known as Stéphane, was born in Paris to Numa Mallarmé, a government administrator, and Élisabeth Desmolins, who died when Stéphane was five, after which point Stéphane came, along with his sister Maria, under the tutelage of his grandfather. His father remarried Anne-Hubertine Léonide Mathieu, who had three girls and a son. Mallarmé’s performance at school was mediocre, and his teachers at Passy reproached him for his "rebellious and vain character"; he was subsequently expelled in 1855. His first poems date from 1854. He was deeply affected by the death of his sister in 1857, as testified in some early prose ("Ce que disaient les trois cigognes," "Plainte d’automne").
Nihonga
Authors: Kazuhara Eve Loh
Published: September 2018

Nihonga refers to Japanese-style painting that uses mineral pigments, and occasionally ink, together with other organic pigments on silk or paper. It was a term coined during the Meiji period (1868–1912) to differentiate it from its counterpart, known as Yôga (洋画) or Western-style painting. The term literally translates to "pictures of Japan." Nihonga has gone through many phases of development since the Meiji period. Critics differentiate between the Kyoto and Tokyo schools of Nihonga, and in particular their styles and subject matter, but both developments should be taken into consideration concurrently to give a comprehensive account of Nihonga. Furthermore, because Nihonga artists reference the myriad of styles from Japan’s rich pictorial heritage, such as the stylistic traditions from Nanga (南画), Rinpa (琳派) and Kano (狩野派) to Murayama-Shijio (円山四条) schools, it is no wonder that the term is confused further with other genres within Japanese art, such as Ukiyo-e (浮世絵) or Suibokuga (水墨画). Confusion aside, Nihonga remains a relatively modern entry into Japanese painting history.
O’Keeffe, Georgia (1887–1986)
Authors: Hartel Jr Herbert R.
Published: September 2018

Georgia O’Keeffe was one of the most important American and women artists of the twentieth century and a leading early abstract painter. She is most famous for her synaesthetic, sensuously colored, and painterly abstractions and enlarged close-ups of flowers done in the late-1910s and 1920s, and her paintings of animal bones from the 1930s and 1940s.
Carrington, Leonora (1917–2011)
Authors: Caplow Deborah
Published: September 2018

Leonora Carrington was a painter, sculptor, poet and novelist who drew on mythology, fantasy and the occult to create images of a dreamlike world. She grew up in a wealthy family in England, educated by governesses, and was deeply influenced by the fairy tales her Irish nanny told her. Her parents sent her to convent schools, and although they expected her to become a socialite, they allowed her to attend Mrs. Penrose’s Academy of Art in Florence, Italy. Once back in London in 1936, Carrington enrolled in Amédée Ozenfant’s Academy of Fine Arts. She attended the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London, and was impressed by the work of Max Ernst, whom she met the following year. Carrington moved to France in 1937 to be with Ernst and joined the Surrealist circle in Paris; however, the two of them were separated at the beginning of World War II, and Carrington made her way to Mexico City, where she joined a group of exiled Surrealists. She based her Self Portrait of 1938 on Celtic myths, and after moving to Mexico, she included Pre-Columbian imagery in many of her works. In later years she divided her time between New York and Mexico City. She received the Order of the British Empire in 2000.
Spaces for Modern Art in North Africa
Authors: Pieprzak Katarzyna
Published: September 2018

In the twenty-first century, works of modern art appear in national museums, private museums, galleries, and independent exhibit spaces across North Africa (defined here as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt). The most significant of these spaces are the Museum of Modern Art Algiers (MAMA) in Algeria (founded in 2007), and the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art in Cairo (founded in 1927). However, in the 1950s and 1960s, at the height of the modern art movement in the region, there were very few public museum or gallery spaces for modern art. With the notable exception of Egypt, national museums across the region were for the most part inherited colonial structures. In line with the colonial logic behind their creation, these museums tended to display archaeological finds and local arts that were considered traditional such as pottery, textiles, manuscript illumination, and woodcarving. From the 1950s to the 1990s, the majority of work by North African modernists was displayed abroad or in small galleries, local salons, fine arts academies, or art festivals. North African artists also worked to create alternative spaces for modern art, in street exhibits, art publications, and independent galleries.
Hamilton, Richard (1922–2011)
Authors: Hess Heather
Published: September 2018

British painter and printmaker Richard Hamilton is best known as a progenitor of Pop Art. While mass media and consumer culture remained key points of investigation, ultimately Hamilton’s significance as a modern artist came from the deep technical and conceptual complexity of his work, which took as its touchstone the art, ideas, and legacy of Marcel Duchamp. Hamilton’s ecumenical approach to style and medium was not constrained by conventional hierarchies that separated fine art from commercial and popular culture. Throughout his career, readymades and photography were important sources, and he experimented with new technologies such as Polaroid instant cameras, computers, and inkjet printers. He often worked serially, exploring and exporting ideas across different media, with some projects spanning years, such as with his illustrations to James Joyce’s Ulysses. He was a slow and deliberate painter, and, from the 1970s, worked on a just small number of canvases, while remaining prolific in prints and multiples. Underlying his diverse oeuvre was his fixation on understanding how things were made, which led him to recreate artworks by Duchamp and to master other artists’ styles. He collaborated with other artists, most extensively Dieter Roth, and master printers.
St John, Christopher (1871–1960)
Authors: Ferris Lesley
Published: September 2018

Christabel Marshall, later Christopher St John, studied at Somerville College in Oxford before moving to London, where she worked as a secretary to Lady Randolph Churchill while writing her first novel, The Crimson Weed (1900). She was a fervent admirer of the British actress Ellen Terry, which led her to an eventual acquaintance with Terry’s daughter, the producer, director, designer, and actress Edith (Edy) Craig, with whom she spent nearly fifty years until Craig’s death in 1947. She changed her name to Christopher St John after converting to Catholicism. Active in the suffrage movement, St John played the role of the eighteenth-century cross-dressed soldier Hannah Snell in Cicely Hamilton’s A Pageant of Great Women (1909), and she and Hamilton co-wrote the popular suffrage comedy How the Vote Was Won (1909)—both plays were directed by Craig. St John also worked as a translator and playwright for Craig’s company the Pioneer Players (1911–25), which staged her play The First Actress in 1911, a work that reinvented the suffrage pageant model by spotlighting the role of the actress and her centuries-long absence from the stage.
Bretyenbach, Breyten (1936–)
Authors: Viljoen Hein
Published: September 2018

Breyten Breytenbach is the foremost poet among the "Sestigers," a prolific painter, and also a controversial public figure. He was born in Bonnievale, South Africa, studied in Cape Town and went into voluntary exile in Paris after marrying Ngo Thi Huang Lien, a Vietnamese woman (also known as Yolande). To date he has published nineteen volumes of poetry, several collections of essays, seven parts of an autobiography, two highly controversial plays, and two novels. His surrealist-type work is inspired by a Zen-Buddhist sense of the mindful continuity underlying mutable existence. An uncanny ability to transform and permutate words and to bend language to his own will characterises his work.

After studying at the Michaelis School of Art at the University of Cape Town, Breytenbach travelled to Europe, working in different places before settling as a painter in Paris in 1962. He lived in voluntary exile in Paris, as the South African government refused to give his "non-white" wife a visa.

He made his debut in 1964 with the poetry collection Die ysterkoei moet sweet [The Iron Cow Must Sweat] and a collection of uncannily flavored short prose works, Katastrofes [Catastrophes] (both awarded the APB Prize in 1966). These works were highly original and innovative, and made use of surrealist techniques to depict a reaching out towards Zen satori.
Ellis, Havelock (1859–1939)
Authors: Atkinson Kate
Published: September 2018

Henry Havelock Ellis was a pioneer of sexology, the scientific study of human sexuality. As he details in his memoir My Life (1939), he grew up in South London, England, and had an open marriage with Edith Ellis (née Lees) (1861–1916), who was a lesbian. Ellis is best known for his seven-volume series, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897–1928). The earliest of these volumes, a study of (mostly male) same-sex behaviors entitled Sexual Inversion (inversion being Ellis’s preferred term for "homosexuality," a term he disliked) appended writings by poet and sexologist J. A. Symonds (1840–1893). The book was banned in Britain on grounds of obscenity, forcing Ellis to publish all further writings in the United States. Ellis was an early theorist of what he termed "erotism," developing influential concepts and theories regarding auto-erotism, sadism, masochism, and fetishism. Ellis participated, with Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), in the burgeoning study of non-normative sexual practices, which he grouped under the umbrella term "erotic symbolism" (Ellis cited in Schaffner: 99). Suggesting that "abnormal" expressions of sexuality were congenital and harmless, Ellis advocated for the reform of laws that criminalized acts of "inversion" (homosexual acts) in public and private. A proponent of eugenics, Ellis also shared a long-standing friendship with American contraceptive-rights leader Margaret Sanger.
Ray, Satyajit (1921–1992)
Authors: Parui Avishek
Published: September 2018

Satyajit Ray was an Indian filmmaker, writer, music director, and illustrator, considered among the greatest auteur-directors of 20th-century cinema, along with the likes of Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Andrei Tarkovsky. Born into an illustrious family of intellectuals who epitomized the high point of the late 19th-century Bengal Renaissance, Ray studied economics and fine arts before going on to join the British advertising firm D. J. Keymer in 1943, where he worked as visual designer.
Garnett, Edward (1868–1937)
Authors: Peters John
Published: September 2018

Although he wrote little of artistic merit himself, Edward Garnett was very influential on British modernism. Like Ezra Pound, Garnett had an uncanny ear for good literature. As a manuscript reader for publishers, he was instrumental in the discovery or fostering of many important writers during this period, among them Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, John Galsworthy, Edward Thomas, Robert Frost, W. H. Hudson, Liam O’Flaherty, Sean O’Faolain, Henry Green and T. E. Lawrence.
Charles Olson (1910–1970)
Authors: Fitzpatrick Ryan
Published: September 2018

Actively writing in the 1950s and 1960s, poet and critic Charles Olson is a key figure of both the New American Poetry and the Black Mountain school. He is best known for articulating—in his essay ‘Projective Verse’—the idea of ‘open-field’ poetics, opposed to inherited stanza form, as well as for his exploration of the long poem in The Maximus Poems.
Remizov, Aleksei Mikhailovich (РЕМИЗОВ, АЛЕКСЕЙ МИХАЙЛОВИЧ) (1877–1957)
Authors: Palmer Isobel
Published: September 2018

Aleksei Mikhailovich Remizov was a Silver Age prose writer, associated with the Symbolists but not aligned completely with the tenets of this movement. Born in Moscow, he died as an émigré in Paris at the end of an unusually long and prolific career; in total, he published 83 books. Arrested and expelled from Moscow University in 1896 for participating in student riots, he was imprisoned and then exiled to the provinces. He returned to St Petersburg in 1905, where he took an active part in literary life until his emigration in 1921, via Berlin to Paris. Regarded by many as a ‘writer’s writer’, Remizov is known for his highly poetic prose and ornate, often esoteric style. Part derivative (based on folk-tales, legends, mystery plays, and so on), part non-derivative (novels, short stories, fragments, dreams, biographical narratives), his work makes innovative use of the Russian language, mingling vocabulary taken from contemporary speech, pre-Petrine Russian chronicles, folk sources, and more. Influenced by Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Leskov, he is widely regarded as a master of skaz, employed in such works as Neuemnyi buben (‘The Indefatigable Tambourine’, 1910).
Rodker, John (1894–1955)
Authors: Menmuir Alasdair
Published: September 2018

The son of Polish-Jewish immigrants into Britain, John Rodker was born in Manchester on 18 December 1894 and subsequently raised in London from age six. A close friend of David Bomberg and Isaac Rosenberg (known widely as ‘The Whitechapel Boys’), he was schooled and encultured by the East End Jewish community in London, the context of which—politically vibrant, socially and culturally mixed, confrontational and embattled—shaped his literary and personal genius. Writing shortly before, during and after World War I, his work—essays, prose, poetry and translations—appeared in avant-garde and ‘little magazines’ such as The Egoist and New Freewoman, The Dial and The Little Review, and was appreciated and assessed by major figures of canonical modernism such as Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound.
Rulfo, Juan Nepomuceno Carlos Pérez Vizcaíno (1917–1986)
Authors: Lisi Laura
Published: September 2018

Juan Rulfo was a Mexican writer and photographer and is considered one of the most influential writers of Spanish-language literature in the modern age. His literary production is mainly limited to two brief works—a collection of short stories, El Llano en llamas [The Burning Plain], and a novel, Pedro Páramo—which sufficed to assign him a central place in world literature. Rulfo was a man of few words who in his writing attempted to fulfil his ideal of a literary style without ornament. His stories and novel have been described as masterpieces of prose, considered ‘poetic prose’ by some, where direct descriptions are avoided and every word is calculated to depict environments, characters and actions by pure insinuation or allusion to elements that they lack.

Rulfo’s early life was marked by his father’s assassination in 1923 and his mother’s death only a few years later, in 1927. At the age of eight, during the unrest caused by the Mexican Revolution and the anti-clerical measures that led to the Cristero War (1926–29), Rulfo remembers having discovered his love for reading, when the town priest hid his library in his grandmother’s house, to save it from being confiscated by the revolutionary forces.
Sargeson, Frank (1903–1982)
Authors: Schwass Margot
Published: September 2018

Along with Katherine Mansfield and Janet Frame, Frank Sargeson is one of New Zealand’s most widely recognized writers. In a career spanning nearly sixty years, he wrote short stories, novels, plays, autobiography, and criticism, and was published in Britain, Australia, Europe, and the USA as well as in his own country. He is popularly viewed as founder and sentinel of the terse, masculine, and essentially realist prose tradition that dominated New Zealand literature for much of his lifetime. However, particularly since the 1980s, readers and critics have attended to qualities other than the apparently authentic ‘New Zealandness’ of Sargeson’s fiction: the narrative subtlety and stylistic sophistication that lies beneath the deceptively plain stories of the 1930s and 1940s, the savagery and compassion of his social vision, his heavily-encoded critique of conventional sexual morality, and the artistic reinvention that enabled his late-career flourishing.
Schnitzler, Arthur (1862–1931)
Authors: Garloff Katja
Published: September 2018

Arthur Schnitzler was a leading exponent of Viennese modernism. The son of a Jewish laryngologist, Schnitzler studied and practised medicine before devoting himself exclusively to writing. His literary works explore the themes of love and death, reality and illusion, and changing codes of honour and morality. In his dramatic plays, Schnitzler emphasizes dialogue over action and often shows how people speak past each other. In his prose, he experiments with subjective modes of narration that give readers access to the thoughts and feelings of the characters.

In 1895 Schnitzler achieved a breakthrough with Liebelei [The Reckoning], a play about love, betrayal, social class, and gender roles. Liebelei features a prototypical ‘sweet girl,’ a young woman from the lower middle classes involved in a relationship with an aristocratic man. The 1896/97 Reigen [Hands Around] was to become Schnitzler’s most controversial work. The play consists of ten dialogues between lovers, one of whom will find a new sexual partner in the next scene in each case. Linking members from different social classes into a sexual chain, the play exposes the power asymmetries between them. While Schnitzler was primarily a chronicler of his time and society, he also wrote several historical plays, including the 1899 Der grüne Kakadu [The Green Cockatoo], which is set at the beginning of the French Revolution.
Strachey, (Giles) Lytton (1880–1932)
Authors: Butcher Emma
Published: September 2018

Lytton Strachey was an important twentieth-century biographer and literary critic, best known for his role as a founding member of the highly influential Bloomsbury Group. The group comprised key intellectual and creative figures whose controversial, avant-garde work contributed to the modernization of twentieth-century artistic doctrines. His best-known work, Eminent Victorians, published in 1918, helped reinvent life writing as a high literary art. His satirical representations of celebrated Victorians helped to destabilize nineteenth-century values and exposed the hypocrisy of Victorian morality. He identified as a homosexual, openly discussing his beliefs and values with his close circle of friends. This information was not made public until after his death, caused by undiagnosed stomach cancer, at the age of 51. Although overshadowed by his Bloomsbury contemporaries such as Virginia Woolf, he remains a popular and important figure.
Svevo, Italo (1861–1928)
Authors: Van Den Bossche Bart
Published: September 2018

Italo Svevo was born as Aron Ettore Schmitz in 1861 in Trieste, a city in the north-east of Italy that until 1919 was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Due to the economic woes that hit his bourgeois family, he was forced to work as a bank clerk, albeit without giving up the dream of a literary career. Initially interested mainly in theatre, he published a couple of short stories and two novels, Una vita [A Life] (1893), and Senilità [As a Man Grows Older] (1898). During the first decades of the twentieth century, Svevo’s interest in literature seemed to have waned, at least in appearance, both because of the limited success of his work and his busy professional life. In the same period, however, he made a close friend of James Joyce (who lived in Trieste from 1905 to 1914) and discovered Freudian psychoanalysis, two important factors in the genesis of his third novel, La coscienza di Zeno [Zeno’s Conscience] (1923), soon recognized as one of the ground-breaking novels of international modernism. Encouraged by this success, Svevo planned a fourth novel and published several short stories. Svevo died in 1928 from the injuries sustained in a car accident.
Symons, Arthur William (1865–1945)
Authors: Boyiopoulos Kostas
Published: September 2018

Arthur Symons was a British poet, art and literary critic, memoirist, playwright, short story writer, and editor. He was born in Milford Haven, Wales, on 28 February 1865, the son of Cornish parents: Reverend Mark Symons (1824–1898), a Wesleyan Methodist minister, and Lydia Pascoe (1828–1896). Symons was the foremost exponent of Decadence and the leading promoter of French Symbolism in Britain. An enthused socialite, he manoeuvred successfully through London artistic circles and the Paris avant-garde. In 1901 he married Rhoda Bowser (1874–-1936) and in his later years he retreated to Island Cottage, Wittersham, Kent. In 1908–1910 he suffered a mental collapse in Italy, moving in and out of asylums; he chronicles this experience in Confessions: A Study in Pathology (1930). He recovered and resumed his literary career until his seventies, mainly regurgitating themes of his fin-de-siècle period. He died on 22 January 1945.
Ungaretti, Giuseppe (1888–1970)
Authors: Fabietti Elena
Published: September 2018

Giuseppe Ungaretti was a major Italian author of the first half of the twentieth century. In his poetry he achieves a massive reinvention of Italian poetic language, abolishing punctuation, dismembering syntax and fragmenting the verse into single verbal units. Words acquire a completely new relevance and density, which counterweigh the abundance of silence and blank space, in ways that resonate with the models of Symbolism and the avant-garde, without coinciding with these.

Born in Alexandria in Egypt in 1888 as the son of an emigrant family, Ungaretti received a bilingual education in Italian and French. After moving to Paris in 1912, he became part of Parisian intellectual and poetic life, attended classes at the Sorbonne and came into contact with all major cultural personalities of the time, such as Henri Bergson, Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, and the Italian futurists, among others.
Yvor Winters (1900–1968)
Authors: Joines Rick
Published: September 2018

Arthur Yvor Winters was an iconoclast who valued tradition; a poetic experimentalist who became increasingly committed to inherited poetic forms; a critic committed to rationality whose judgments struck many as wildly eccentric; and a cultivator of faithful but sometimes rebellious disciples. His early poetry is significant for incorporating elements of Native American poetics; his later poetry for its formalist restraint and neo-classical refinement. In 1960, his Collected Poems won the prestigious Bollingen Prize. Born in Chicago, Winters grew up in Eagle Rock, near Los Angeles, California. He attended the University of Chicago where he met his future wife, poet and novelist Janet Lewis. Tuberculosis cut short his studies, and he was sent to a sanatorium in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
de Kooning, Willem (1904–1997)
Authors: Toteva Maia
Published: September 2018

A leading post-World War II artist, Willem de Kooning painted in the vigorous style known as ‘‘gestural abstraction’’ or ‘‘action painting,’’ one of the two divisions of Abstract Expressionism. The artists associated with this Abstract Expressionism—Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell, among others—emphasized the act of painting and used pronounced, often energetic, brushstrokes to convey expression. A preeminent figure of Abstract Expressionism, de Kooning occupied a distinct place within a group that rejected any critical labels. In 1955, de Kooning declared ‘‘Words and labels are very confusing. We need definitions. I’m not an Abstract Expressionist, but I express myself.’’ Although he experimented with various degrees of abstraction and epitomized the bold, improvisational brushstroke of Action Painting, de Kooning created a style that remained unique within the movement, with a deep commitment to the body and the human figure. Blending expressionist, cubist, and surrealist elements with technical skill, his paintings explored the ambiguous relations between figure and ground, abstraction and representation, and abstract versus overt figuration.
Ziadeh, May (1886–1941)
Authors: Haddad Bayan
Published: September 2018

May Ziadeh was a prominent literary figure and salonnière in the Arab world in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. A journalist, essayist, author and literary critic, she was also known for being a spellbinding orator and an unusually gifted stylist and translator. Ziadeh was best known for instituting a long running weekly salon (1911–1931) in her home that brought together leading men and women in the period when Egyptian anti-colonial nationalism was at its height. Ziadeh was also a strong advocate of the emancipation of women in the Arab society.

Famous for being moderate, Ziadeh did not equate modernity with the denial of Arabic cultural heritage in blind imitation of the West. Many critics believe that modern Arabic literature has not produced a female writer of Ziadeh’s calibre and that her contribution to the feminist cause cannot be overlooked.
Wang, Wenxing (王文興)(1939– )
Authors: Chen Lingchei Letty
Published: September 2018

Wang Wenxing is one of the most important fiction writers in the Chinese language in modern times. His experimentation with the Chinese language—pictography and syntax, narrative form, and narrating perspectives—together with his exploration of existential themes establishes him as a paramount figure in Taiwan’s literary modernism and Chinese-language literature worldwide.

Born in Fuzhou, Fujian Province, China, Wang and his family moved to Taiwan in 1946 and settled in Donggang, a small city in the south of the island. Two years later the family moved to Taipei. Wang received his BA from the Foreign Languages and Literatures Department of National Taiwan University. In 1958 Wang published his first short story, Shou ye [The Lingering Night]; a few more stories followed in the next two years. In 1960 Wang and several of his classmates, including Bai Xianyong, Chen Ruoxi and Ouyan Zi—all of whom later became important writers in Taiwan—founded the journal Xiandai wenxue [Modern Literature], which nurtured Taiwan’s modernist movement in the 1960s. After receiving his BA in 1961, Wang served in the military, as was required by law. In 1963 he attended the University of Iowa and received an MFA in creative writing.