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…
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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…
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…
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…
Dance
Historically, modern dance scholarship has followed the contours of the field as defined by John Martin, the revered dance critic for The New York Times,…
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…
Ellis, Havelock (1859–1939)
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…
St. Vincent Millay, Edna (1892–1950)
Edna St. Vincent Millay was a poet, playwright and free-spirited bohéme who epitomized the aesthetically and sexually adventurous ‘new woman’ of the early twentieth century.…
Makavejev, Dušan (1932–)
Dušan Makavejev is an avant-garde Marxist Serbian filmmaker whose film techniques, exuberant black humour, and sexual and political transgressive themes made him one of the…
Symonds, John Addington (1840–1893)
John Addington Symonds was an English historian, biographer and poet best known for his writings on sexuality. Though Symonds’s father was a well-known physician and…
Parnok, Sofia Yakovlevna [Парнок, София Яковлевна] (1885–1933)
Sofia Parnok was born into a Jewish family, in the southern Russian city of Taganrog. Her father was a pharmacist; her mother, a doctor, died…
Allen, Barney (1902–1967)
Barney Allen was the pseudonym of Solomon Allen, a Jewish-Canadian novelist from Toronto, Ontario. His writing combined influences from James Joyce and Sigmund Freud. His…
Dropkin, Celia (1887–1956)
Celia Dropkin, one of the greatest yet lesser-known Yiddish poets, revolutionized modern Yiddish poetry with her pioneering exploration of gender dynamics. Bold erotic motifs in…
Yellow Book, The
The Yellow Book was a London-based literary quarterly, published from 1894 to 1897 by Elkin Matthews and John Lane, which served to promote the work…
Zinovieva-Annibal, Lydia Dmitrievna (1866–1907)
A Russian prose writer and dramatist, Zinovieva-Annibal (with her second husband, Viacheslav Ivanov) hosted the influential literary salon known as The Tower. Born in St…
Forster, E.M. (1879–1970)
One of the leading British novelists of the early decades of the twentieth century, Edward Morgan Forster is best known for his novels Howards End…
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.…
Margolin, Anna (1887–1952)
Anna Margolin is a Yiddish poet of the first half of the twentieth century, and though she produced only a single volume of poetry, Margolin…
Rozanov, Vasily (1856–1919)
Leading writer, publicist, literary critic, and philosopher in late 19th- and early 20th-century Russia, Rozanov was born in Vetluga, Russia, in 1856, and remained in…
Cahun, Claude (1894–1953)
One of the emblematic figures of the French avant-garde, Claude Cahun was born Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob on October 25, 1894 in Nantes, the niece…
Hall, Radclyffe (1880–1943)
Radclyffe Hall was a British novelist, poet, and lyricist. A contemporary of the Bloomsbury Group and proponent of Havelock Ellis's sexological theories, Hall is best…
Mishima, Yukio (1925–1970)
Mishima Yukio is the pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka. He was an acclaimed novelist, playwright, poet, and essayist. He was nominated three times for the…
Lawrence, D. H. (1885-1930)
David Herbert Lawrence (1885–1930) was born in Eastwood, near Nottingham, England. He composed poetry, several travel books, expressionist paintings, short novels and stories, literary criticism…
Shimmy
The shimmy, also known as the shim-me-sha-wabble, is a jazz dance that features the upper body, especially the shoulders, shaking and quivering horizontally from side…