Anarchism
Anarchism is a term derived from the Greek anarkhia, meaning “contrary to authority” or ”without a ruler.“ Anarchism narrowly refers to a theory of society…
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Dadaism
Dada began in Zurich, Switzerland, in the midst of World War I. Several expatriate artists converged in the city to escape the brutal and seemingly…
Intellectual Currents
This section focusses on the historical, sociological, philosophical, economic, political, and scientific context of modernism. Entries cover individuals, coteries, movements, and events. The primary criterion…
Film Subject Overview
The Film Section includes entries on a variety of modernist genres, periods, movements, directors, films, and critical modes aligned with modernist aims and intellectual attitudes.…
Modernism in Europe
We are living in a very singular moment of history. It is a moment of crisis, in the literal sense of that word. In every…
Modernism in East Asia
The term ‘modernism’ is commonly used to describe some of the literary and cultural production of the early twentieth century in China, Japan, and Korea,…
Modernism in Canada and The United States
In Canada and the United States modernism emerges from transnational engagements with global intellectual movements while also grappling with local intellectual, cultural, and political developments…
Surrealism Overview
Soupault’s publication of Manifeste du Surréalism in 1924. Rising in the wake of the First World War, Surrealism revolted against a world that had become…
Modernism in South Asia
In South Asia, a certain haziness regarding modernism and modernity derives not only from the manner in which they can be elided with each other,…
Expressionism
Expressionism was one of the foremost modernist movements to emerge in Europe in the early years of the twentieth-century. It had a profound effect on…
Symbolism Overview
Symbolism is a late-nineteenth-century literary movement centred mostly around the work of poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Philippe Villiers de L’Isle-Adam,…
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…
BLAST (1914–1915)
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…
Vigo, Jean (1905–1934)
Jean Vigo was an anarchist and social realist French filmmaker responsible for four short yet influential works. Famously honored as “the cinema incarnate” by Henri…
Berkman, Alexander (1870–1936)
Alexander Berkman (21 November 1870–28 June 1936), while largely remote from literary concerns, was closely connected to a number of key modernist figures, helping to…
Smart, Elizabeth (1913–1986)
Elizabeth Smart was a Canadian poet and novelist, best known for By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept– a novella-length work of prose…
Duncan, Robert (Edward) (1919–1988)
Robert Duncan was an American poet, dramatist, and critic central to the San Francisco Renaissance and Black Mountain College. He was born Edward Howard Duncan…
Grassic Gibbon, Lewis (1901–1935)
Lewis Grassic Gibbon, a pseudonym for James Leslie Mitchell, was a key writer of the early 20th-century Scottish Renaissance, most famous for his trilogy A…
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–1980)
Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher, left-wing political activist, playwright, and novelist. One of the leading French public intellectuals of the twentieth century, he was…
Apocalypse Poets
The Apocalypse Poets (or Apocalyptics) were a network of British writers centred around the largely forgotten Apocalypse poetry movement. Apocalypse poetry, inspired by the notion…
Sorel, Georges (1847–1922)
Georges Sorel was a French social thinker and political theorist. An engineer of modest bourgeois extraction, he was a state employee for twenty-five years. He…
Woodcock, George (1912–1995)
George Woodcock was a British-Canadian poet, political activist, biographer, travel writer, novelist, dramatist, translator, and literary critic. He was born in Winnipeg, but spent his…
Miller, Henry (1891–1980)
An iconoclastic writer of autobiographical fiction, travel narratives, and personal essays, Henry Miller drew on several strands of European Modernism, including Surrealism, Dada, and Expressionism.…
Zero de Conduite (Zero for Conduct) (1933)
Directed by Jean Vigo, Zero for Conduct is a short film about young boarding school students rebelling against their teachers’ strictures. The film is an…
Satō, Haruo (1892–1964)
Satō Haruo was a modern Japanese writer and poet active from the late Meiji to the mid Shōwa era, roughly from the 1910s until his…