bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Döblin, (Bruno) Alfred (1878-1957)
Authors: Heidt Todd 
Published: September 2018

Alfred Döblin’s contributions to modern literature consist primarily of his montage style, epic narrative structures and critical eye toward contemporary culture. His masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz. Die Geschichte vom Franz Biberkopf (Berlin Alexanderplatz. The Story of Franz Biberkopf) brought international acclaim and is often credited as the first German-language city novel. He was Jewish and thus fled the Nazi regime, settling in Hollywood for a time. He returned to Germany as a French Cultural Officer; however, he found Germany unwilling to cope with the recent past. Feeling out of place in Germany, he emigrated again in 1953 to France, and he died in 1957.
Döblin was born the fourth of five children in Szcecin (modern-day Poland). His father abandoned the family when Döblin was still young, motivating his mother to relocate to Berlin in 1888. He grew up in working-class neighborhoods and studied medicine. His first publication, Lydia und Mäxchen (1906), parodically and self-reflexively deals with Döblin’s role as author, but found little readership. In 1912 he married Erna Reiss, with whom he had four sons. He published a collection of short stories, Die Ermordung einer Butterblume (The Murder of a Buttercup), in 1913. The title story features a salesman who absent-mindedly knocks the flower off a buttercup during a walk. His resulting fear of nature’s revenge for this misdeed (often read as a symbolic rape) escalates to neurotic levels. Döblin here combined his literary talents with his medical training, which included training in psychiatry.
Head, Bessie Amelia (1937–1986)
Authors: MacKenzie Craig 
Published: September 2018

Novelist, short-story and non-fiction writer Bessie Head was born in a Pietermaritzburg psychiatric institution, her white mother Bessie Amelia Emery (née Birch), who had had a long history of mental illness, having unexpectedly become pregnant (the identity of Head’s black father has never been discovered). Head grew up in foster care until the age of 13; thereafter the welfare authorities placed her in an Anglican mission orphanage in Durban. In 1961 she met and married fellow journalist Harold Head in Cape Town; their only child, Howard, was born in 1962. After the break-up of her marriage in 1964 she relinquished South African citizenship and took up a teaching post in Serowe, Botswana. Plagued by ill health and mental instability, she died in Serowe with six published works to her name and an international reputation as one of Africa’s foremost woman writers.
Head’s first novel, When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), deals in predominantly realist fashion with the flight from South Africa of a young black political activist, his resettlement in Botswana and marriage to a Batswana woman. Her second novel, Maru (1971), which derives its name from its eponymous central character, is an altogether more complex work.
Themba, Daniel Canadoise D’Orsay (Can) (1924–1967)
Authors: Masemola Kgomotso 
Published: September 2018

Born in the Marabastad township of Pretoria, Can Themba distinguished himself early by winning the Mendi Memorial Scholarship, which enabled him to attend Fort Hare University, from where he graduated with a BA in 1947. He went on to earn a teacher’s diploma from Rhodes University. The same year that he graduated he published his first short story in the student journal The Fort Harian. He taught for brief spells at the Western Native High School and the Central Indian High School on the outskirts of Johannesburg, but was always more interested in writing than teaching. He won the first Drum magazine short story competition for his work ‘Mob Passion’ in 1953, competing with a thousand entries from home and abroad, including works by Cyprian Ekwensi and Bloke Modisane. Peter Abrahams, one of the judges of this competition, was highly impressed with his writing. Later, Langston Hughes was to be similarly impressed. Soon Themba was catapulted from his erstwhile teaching career into full-time journalism on both Drum and Africa! magazines.
By the late 1950s Themba’s colleagues had been forced into exile because of the political situation in South Africa. He himself was shamed into voluntary exile in Swaziland after he had been fired, as a consequence of his addiction to alcohol.
Almada Negreiros, José Sobral de (1883–1970)
Authors: Muñoz Antonio Trinidad 
Published: September 2018

José Sobral de Almada Negreiros was a Portuguese artist (mainly writer and painter) and a most dynamic and multifaceted figure in early 20th-century Portuguese culture. Moving constantly between literature and the visual arts, he produced a multidisciplinary oeuvre. Both in his literary work, which includes poetry, short stories, drama, and essays, and in his painting and graphic work, Almada Negreiros took a rebellious and combative stance towards traditional academism and aesthetic conservatism. One of the main advocates of avant-garde in Portugal, he also championed the modernization of the country, motivated by the ideal of "educating the people through scandal."
Born in the then Portuguese African colony of São Tomé e Príncipe, Almada Negreiros lost his mother at the age of three. Because his father was organizing the Pavilion of Portuguese Colonies for the 1900 World Fair in Paris, he spent his childhood and adolescence in a boarding school in Lisbon. Later on he attended a secondary school in Coimbra and the International School in Lisbon. Almada Negreiros would never obtain a university degree; he was a self-taught artist and a fervent reader and drawer from a very young age. In 1911 he started his career as a collaborator of the newspaper A Sátira; a year later, he participated in the I Salão dos Humoristas (first Salon of Humorists), an exhibition of caricatures and graphic humor in Lisbon.
Zhu, Tianwen (1956– )
Authors: Tsai Chien-hsin 
Published: September 2018

In Taiwan, the Zhu family is like the Brontës of England, known for their literary achievements. Zhu Tianyi, youngest of the three, is a fluent essayist. Zhu Tianxin, the second daughter, has been publishing essays and stories since high school. In her novella The Old Capital—echoing a novel of the same name by the Japanese Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari—a second-person narration of Taiwan’s colonial past and present unfolds. The most outspoken of the sisters, Zhu Tianxin never hesitates to confront political authority in her stories.
In contrast, Zhu Tianwen’s gestures are ever so gentle, and her expression lyrical. She is not a prolific fiction writer. To date, she has published only two full-length novels and a small number of short narratives. Yet their stylistic exuberance and expressive intelligence more than make up for her modest output.
Taiwanese by birth, Zhu Tianwen shows a strong sense of attachment to her spiritual homeland, China, especially in her writings before the 1980s. The influence comes from two men: her father, Zhu Xining, and Hu Lancheng. The two Chinese men were both forced by political circumstances to leave China. They became close friends and neighbors in 1976.
Bluvshtain (Sela), Rachel (1890–1931)
Authors: Segal Miryam 
Published: September 2018

Rachel Bluvshtain was the most salient and recognizable symbol of Labour Zionism in the 20th century and remains one of the most popular Hebrew poets in Israel into the 21st century.
Bluvshtain was born to a Jewish family in Russia. As a young woman on her first visit to Palestine, she decided to join a Jewish settlement there, abandoning her plan to study art in Italy. Although her poems came to be associated with Labour Zionism and the Jewish pioneers in early 20th century Palestine, her poetic career began only once she left her work collective due to illness, and ended about a decade later with her death at the age of 40.
Her short modernist lyric poetry betrays Russian acmeist and French imagist influence. Many of Bluvshtain’s poems capture and express a momentary thought, feeling, or memory. Their vocabulary and syntax are seemingly straightforward, they contain only a few images, and are concise. Bluvshtain’s style and her poems’ explicit celebration of simplicity allowed her to be read initially as a naïve contributor to ‘women’s poetry.’ A few scholarly works have since revised this critical assessment by showing the intertextual play, ambivalent language, and critique of contemporary poetic expectations embedded in her poems.
Bosman, Herman Charles (1905–1951)
Authors: MacKenzie Craig 
Published: September 2018

A short-story writer, novelist, poet and journalist, Bosman was born in Kuils River near Cape Town, but spent most of his life in the Transvaal, and it is the Transvaal milieu that features in almost all of his writings. He became known in the 1940s for his ‘Oom Schalk Lourens’ stories, and his use of this simple-seeming but wily narrator has ensured his place in South African literature as one of the country’s most enduring and best-loved storywriters. Schalk Lourens features in the short-story collections Mafeking Road (1947) and Unto Dust (1963), while Bosman’s prison memoir, Cold Stone Jug (1949), set the trend for this important genre in South Africa.
Bosman was educated at Jeppe Boys’ High School, the University of the Witwatersrand and Normal College, where he qualified as a teacher. In January 1926 he received a posting to the Groot Marico in the remote Western Transvaal, as it was known then. Despite its short duration, this stay later inspired almost all of his 150 short stories. In July 1926, on vacation at the family home in Johannesburg, he became embroiled in a family quarrel and shot and killed his step-brother David Russell. He was tried and sentenced to death—a sentence that was later commuted to imprisonment for ten years with hard labour. He eventually served four years of this sentence and was released on parole in August 1930.
Der Blaue Reiter [The Blue Rider]
Authors: Grimm Dagmar 
Published: September 2018

Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) was an affiliated circle of artists of varying disciplines loosely organized by the visual artists Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc in 1911/12 in Munich.
The recognition of the spiritual undercurrents of the work of Der Blaue Reiter artists is reflected in their name: the oblique association of the "Blue Flower" of German Romanticism can be read as demonstrating the intentions of the founders in suggesting the link to their historical Romantic precursor, while the "Rider" points to their forward thrust and advocacy on behalf of modern art.
The origin of the name has not been reliably ascertained but is often linked to the title of a painting by Kandinsky of a horse and rider (1903), which was found to have been altered (possibly to suggest the link), and which was also negated in an explanation by Kandinsky himself.
Walcott, Derek (1930--)
Authors: Emery Mary Lou 
Published: September 2018

World-renowned poet, playwright and essayist Derek Walcott won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. He grew up in his birthplace, Castries, St Lucia, immersed in the landscape, history, and creolized cultures of the Caribbean. In his writing, Walcott expresses both anguish for the wounds inflicted by the past, and joy for the beauty of the West Indies. For Walcott, art is the revolutionary medium through which to seek the transcendence of racial and regional divisions; he achieves universality in his art through love of what is particular to the Caribbean.
Drawing on canonical modernist influences such as Eliot, Joyce, and Yeats — and the classics of Western literature that also inspired them — Walcott’s writing emerged during the West Indian cultural nationalism of the 1950s–1970s and alongside the Latin American ‘boom,’ developing into a postcolonial modernism. His work is especially attentive to the natural environment of the West Indies, and proposes an Adamic imagination that sees and names the New World afresh. Much of his writing re-envisions sea-voyaging literary figures such as Robinson Crusoe and, especially, Odysseus, while also exploring the journeys taken and obstacles faced by the contemporary poet.
Shi’r
Authors: Luce Mark D. 
Published: September 2018

The journal, Shi’r (Poetry 1957–70) was established in Beirut by Yūsuf al-Khāl and the poet theorist Adunis to save poetry from politics. It emerged as a professional avant-garde monthly journal with a core group of young poets dedicated to poetry and poetic studies. The journal supported poetic experimentation. Shi’r advocated for the prose poem as a way to spark cultural change, believing that innovative efforts were necessary to intellectually modernize the Arab World.
Shi’r rebelled against the ‘committed literature’ (al-adab al-multazim) movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The circle believed this to be ‘a prostitution of art’ to political causes and ideologies. Shi’r was perceived as a subversive cultural movement. It was banned in a number of countries, accused of supporting a culture war against Arab nationalism, and of being funded by the CIA and French intelligence, inter alia.
Shi’r’s poets were more concerned with the post-colonial Arab ‘state of being’ than reforming or overthrowing states. The Shi’r poets adopted the concept of ru’iya or vision theorized in 1959 by Adunis (Ali Ahmad Said) who asserted that modern poetry possessed a mystical or intuitive knowledge that allowed the poet to see beyond. The intention was to liberate Arab consciousness and to liberate it from the qasidah using the Arabic language, to free one’s thinking.
Sinclair, May (1863–1946)
Authors: Randall Bryony 
Published: September 2018

May Sinclair was a novelist, journalist and literary critic. She began writing relatively late in life to help support her family, and while most of her novels would most obviously be categorized as realist, she was a great advocate for the experimentation of writers such as Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, and is perhaps most influential today as a literary critic of modernism; she was for example the first critic to use the term ‘stream of consciousness’ in relation to literature.
Her first commercial success came with her third novel The Divine Fire (1904), a philosophical novel combining a love story with an exploration and critique of the contemporary literary marketplace. Subsequent novels focused largely on social and/or marriage problems, prominent themes in literature of the period. A committed campaigner for women’s rights, her World War I novels (Tasker Jevons: the Real Story of 1916 and The Tree of Heaven of 1917) express her support for the war at a time when the suffrage movement was split between pacifist and pro-combat factions. She wrote two identifiably experimental novels, Mary Olivier (1919) and The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922), both significantly influenced by her interest in psychoanalysis.
Singer, Isaac Bashevis (1904–1991)
Authors: Furnish Ben 
Published: September 2018

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in Leoncin, Poland, where his father was a Hasidic rabbi. He grew up between 1908–1917 in Warsaw and from 1917–1921 in Bilgoray (Biłgoraj), which shaped his knowledge of small-town Jewish life. The younger brother of Yiddish writers Israel Joshua Singer and Esther Kreitman, Singer began reading secular literature at 10, and after years of religious study, he eventually followed his brother into Warsaw’s bohemian literary Yiddish community, translating several modern writers into Yiddish.
Singer’s first novel, Der Sotn in Goray [Satan in Goray], set in seventeenth-century Poland with the background of pogroms and the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi, appeared in 1934, and the next year, he joined Israel Joshua in New York City where both wrote for the Yiddish press. In 1950, Singer married Alma Haimann Wassermann, a German Jewish immigrant from a once-wealthy family, who supported the couple by working as a retail clerk. Singer wrote in Yiddish for his entire life; most of his novels were serialized in the Jewish Daily Forward Yiddish newspaper. Unlike most great Yiddish writers, he found success in translation, particularly after Saul Bellow’s translation of the story ‘Gimpel the Fool’ appeared in Partisan Review in 1953.
Williams, Raymond (1921–1988)
Authors: Wallace Jeff 
Published: September 2018

The critic, cultural historian and novelist Raymond Williams was an influential theorist of the emergence of literary and cultural modernism, and a key figure in the development of British literary and cultural theory. He is widely recognized as the founder of the discipline of cultural studies and of the theory of cultural materialism.
Born in the Welsh border village of Pandy in 1921, Williams attended Grammar School in Abergavenny, and then Cambridge University, where he resumed his studies in 1945 after military service. Following a period of teaching in adult education, Williams was appointed to a Chair in Drama at Cambridge University in 1961, which he occupied until his untimely death in 1988. Since the late 1930s, Williams had been drawn to German Expressionist film and the fiction of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce. His interests in Naturalist drama and the movement beyond it into modernist experimentation are encoded in a sustained engagement with Ibsen’s work, first in Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (1952), and then in Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (1969), the latter updated to include an account of the ‘complex seeing’ of Bertolt Brecht’s modernist stagecraft.
Evans, Walker (1903–1975)
Authors: Slipp Naomi 
Published: September 2018

Walker Evans was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration during the American Depression. His documentary style, historically regarded as detached, is now viewed as characteristic of Evans’s own point of view.
Born to an affluent family in St. Louis, Missouri, Evans studied literature at Williams College before moving to Paris in 1926. In 1928, Evans moved to New York City and began taking photographs, citing Eugène Atget as an influence. He was given a solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1932. He traveled to Havana in the following year. The photographs taken there reveal a country in the midst of a revolution, and were published in The Crime of Cuba (1933) alongside text by journalist Carleton Beals. Two years later, Evans began working for Fortune magazine, eventually contributing over four hundred images to the publication before his departure in 1965. Evans’s penetrating documentary images express an interest in the everyday lives of individuals, balancing senses of both intimacy and detachment. His photographs of the Depression are considered some of the most iconic images of that era.
Griffith, David Wark (1875–1948)
Authors: Wiedenfeld Grant 
Published: September 2018

American film director D.W. Griffith was a pivotal figure in cinema’s ascendance as a mass medium and modern art form. He is best known for developing editing techniques, such as montage, that brought a new fluency and excitement to cinematic storytelling. He is also remembered for directing the racist blockbuster The Birth of a Nation, a film that has become iconic in prejudiced circles for its anti-African American message.
Born in rural Kentucky, Griffith came of age in the bustling popular theater as an actor and aspiring writer. Economic necessity led him to the Biograph Company, a film studio in New York City, where he would direct hundreds of films from 1908 to 1913, a period in film history known as the "Transition Era." Cinema grew from a fairground attraction to a self-conscious art, exemplified by the feature-length fictional works that arose and were screened in dedicated theaters, with star actors and artists, during this time. The first wave of film historians gave Griffith credit for inventing the montage technique: a modern set of editing methods unique to cinema, the most notable being "parallel editing," which created suspense or drew meaningful contrast by cutting from one line of action to another. Griffith also discovered and cultivated young star actresses such as Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford, and publicized his own authorship while the industry refrained from displaying credits. He participated in the formation of a new cartel of studios that shifted the American industry to Hollywood, California in the mid-1910s.
Coleman, Emily Holmes (1899–1974)
Authors: Podnieks Elizabeth 
Published: September 2018

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

George Orwell is the pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair. A writer, poet, journalist, broadcaster and critic, he is best known for his satirical novel Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), both of which interrogate political systems (and the behavior of the individual within them). The term ‘Orwellian’, meaning ‘following the logic of totalitarianism’, is primarily drawn from these novels. His long-form non-fiction works Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) exemplify his particular brand of social reportage, as well as being some of the most well-known works in the genre generally. Both document life among the poor: the former taking in London’s East End and the less prosperous parts of Paris, and the latter the working-class cities in England’s industrial North.
Orwell’s writing is characterized by straightforward, unembellished prose. His 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ draws a correlation between writing and ideology, lambasting ‘insincerity’ in contemporary written English. This unadorned style helps inform today’s consensus that Orwell was a profoundly common sense writer, committed to clarity in both language and argument. His literary criticism, political reportage, and polemic journalism have been frequently anthologized since his death, and are often held up as models in their respective genres.
Czernowin, Chaya (1957–)
Authors: Barden Mark 
Published: September 2018

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