Literature Subject Overview
Literary modernism is a truly global and plural phenomenon, playing out in multiple cultural paradigms, in various timeframes, and in response to diverse experiences of…
Search Results 1 - 25 of 430
Futurism
Futurism emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century as a movement that explicitly conceptualized the process of literary and artistic experimentation as part of…
Das, Jibanananda (1899-1954)
Jibanananda Das was one of the pre-eminent Bengali poets of the first half of the twentieth century. With the posthumous entry of his prose writings…
Gombrowicz, Witold (1904–1969)
Born into a wealthy landed family, Gombrowicz debuted in the avant-garde milieu of interwar Warsaw. In 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland, he was on…
Mallarmé, Stéphane (Étienne) (1842–1898)
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…
Charles Olson (1910–1970)
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…
Oz, Amos (1939– )
The Hebrew author Amos Oz (born Amos Klausner)—an essayist, professor of literature at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and active contributor to Israeli and…
Remizov, Aleksei Mikhailovich (РЕМИЗОВ, АЛЕКСЕЙ МИХАЙЛОВИЧ) (1877–1957)
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…
Windrush
‘Windrush’ is a term used to describe the post-World War II generation of writers from the English-speaking Caribbean who were published (and most often lived)…
Akhmatova, Anna (1889–1966)
Anna Akhmatova was one of Russia’s most famous poets and arguably its most famous woman poet. During her formative years, she belonged to a literary…
Anand, Mulk Raj (1905–2004)
Mulk Raj Anand, together with Raja Rao and R. K. Narayan, made up a distinguished trio in the vanguard of twentieth-century Indian writing in English.…
Ulysses
A novel by James Joyce, written between 1914 and 1922, serialized from 1918–1920, and published in book form (to much controversy) in 1922. With T.…
Yiddish Literature 1864–1939
The most important writer of old Yiddish literature was Elijah Levita (a.k.a. Elye Bokher, 1469–1549), who adapted the Italian version of the chivalric romance Bevis of Hampton into…
Celtic Twilight, The (1893; revised 1902)
The Celtic Twilight is a collection of folk tales gathered by William Butler Yeats during his interviews with members of the rural working class in…
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso (1876–1944)
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was founder and leader of Futurism, the first intellectual and artistic movement that explicitly defined the codes of avant-garde practice in the…
Pasternak, Boris (1890–1960)
Major Russian poet and writer, Pasternak, was recognized as a leading, original poetic talent with the collection My Sister Life (written 1917, published 1922). My…
Rilke, Rainer Maria (1875–1926)
Rilke was a preeminent German-speaking poet of the beginning of the twentieth century. His early poetical works were still conventional and bathed in neoromantic sentimentality.…
Shklovsky, Viktor (1893–1984)
Born in St Petersburg, Russia, Victor Borisovich Shklovsky (or Shklovskii; Ви́ктор Бори́сович Шкло́вский) was a literary critic, autobiographical novelist, and a leading figure of Russian…
Souster, Raymond (1921–2012)
Raymond Holmes Souster has been described as a poet of place who invests Toronto, the city of his life-long residence, deeply into his writing. Having…
Synaesthesia
Synaesthesia is the confusion or conflation of sensory modalities, where one sense is experienced or described in terms of another as in Charles Baudelaire’s simile…
Van Wyk, Christopher (1957–2014)
Born in Baragwanath, Soweto, Chris van Wyk proved an influential figure on the South African literary scene. Associated with the Black Consciousness movement, his volume…
West, Rebecca (1892–1983)
Rebecca West was a novelist, journalist, essayist, and travel writer, and a central figure in twentieth-century literary and political culture. Her The Return of the…
Zola, Emile (1840–1902)
Emile Zola was a key figure in French realism and a leading figure of the naturalist movement. A prolific novelist, journalist, and theorist, he is…
Kluge, Alexander (1932--)
Alexander Kluge is a German author, film director, and television producer who has also worked as a lawyer, teacher, and political lobbyist. A founding figure of…
Artaud, Antonin (1896-1948)
Antonin Artaud was a French writer and theatre-maker of the early twentieth century. His work includes manifestos, correspondence, poetry, criticism, drama, film acting, and theatre…