Mass Observation
Mass Observation was founded in 1937 by filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, poet Charles Madge, and ethnologist and explorer Tom Harrisson. It was originally conceived as a…
Mass Observation was founded in 1937 by filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, poet Charles Madge, and ethnologist and explorer Tom Harrisson. It was originally conceived as a…
Impressionism is an artistic movement that flourished in France between 1860 and 1890. The term has been widely adopted around the world to describe artistic…
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…
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…
Though they often escape critical scrutiny, concepts such as modernism, modernity, and modernization are at the heart of the concept of development, and thus omnipresent…
As an aesthetic principle, montage, defined as the assemblage of disparate elements into a composite whole often by way of juxtaposition, is most often associated…
Cubism is an art movement that emerged in Paris during the first decade of the 20th century. It was a key movement in the birth…
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…
The Big Bang theory is a scientific model of the universe that posits a state of dense, centralized matter before the current, observable expansion of…
Charles Madge is best known as a founder of Mass Observation, but he was also an accomplished poet, a journalist, and a social scientist. Madge…
O.V. Vijayan was a writer, thinker, political observer, and cartoonist, born in Palakkad, Kerala and rose to prominence with his first novel, Khasakkinte Itihasam (The…
During the twentieth century, though little noticed by most observers, the Christian demographic in Africa exploded from 9.5 million in 1900, to over 400 million…
Olive Cotton was one of Australia’s leading 20th-century photographers. She became a skilled observer of nature, incorporating both the principles of Pictorialism and modernism into…
Sherwood Anderson was an American short-story writer, novelist, and memoirist. He was a businessman turned author whose writing often rendered the lives of ordinary people…
Dancer and choreographer Pearl Primus made significant strides toward securing a vital role for dance artists of color in American modern dance. Sparked by the…
William Dobell was an icon of Australian art during his lifetime, renowned for portraiture but also for the controversy surrounding his being awarded the Archibald…
Born Bronisław Kasper Malinowski to a family in the Polish nobility (the szlachta), Malinowski made contributions to anthropology through his text Argonauts of the Western…
Although he was known as a historian during his lifetime, the work of Henry Adams—like that of Henry James—is often seen as an American precursor…
Proust was a French novelist and essayist known for his masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), published in seven…
From the University of the Western Cape, Arthur Nortje left for Jesus College, Oxford, to which he returned after teaching for two years in Canada.…
Tonalism is an often under-appreciated aspect of Australian painting, which developed from the mid-1910s to the 1950s. A technique pioneered by Max Meldrum (1875–1955) it…
New Verse was a British literary magazine founded by Hugh Ross Williamson (1901–1978) and Geoffrey Grigson (1905–1985). Essentially Grigson’s hobbyhorse, this little magazine would become…
Chris Marker was a French filmmaker, photographer, writer, and multi-media artist who is widely considered to be the foremost pioneer of the essay film. More…
Karl Raimund Popper was one of the twentieth-century’s most influential philosophers of science. Qualified to teach elementary school and to teach physics and mathematics at…
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…