Lulu

by Qingyuan Jiang Lulu is a five-act play written by German playwright Frank Wedekind (1864—1918). Early critics considered it to be “the climax of Wedekind’s artistic creativity” and “the most significant of the author’s works,” and such positive opinions have prevailed in the critical literature since that time.[1] The Lulu Play(s) According to Alan Best,… Continue Reading Lulu

The Seagull

by Pericles Lewis The first of Anton Chekhov‘s major dramatic works, The Seagull (1895), features an aspiring dramatist, Konstantin Treplev, who has cast a girl he loves, Nina, in a play to be performed at his mother’s country house. The “play within a play,” though going back to Shakespeare, became a central feature of twentieth-century… Continue Reading The Seagull

Apples and Oranges

by Pericles Lewis In the still-life “Apples and Oranges” (ca. 1895-1900), Paul Cézanne offers an example of how the interplay of colors and planes on the surface of a canvas can take on greater importance than the ostensible “subject” of the painting. Cézanne’s ambition to “make out of Impressionism something solid and lasting like the… Continue Reading Apples and Oranges

The Time Machine

by Pericles Lewis H.G. Wells’s first novel, The Time Machine (1895), serves almost as an inverted allegory for the way that the artists of his generation imagined the future, as either technological utopia or reversion to barbaraism. Wells’s novel contains both fates. Having traveled over 800,000 years into the future, an inventor discovers that “Man… Continue Reading The Time Machine

Contre Saint-Beuve

by Michael Shapiro Among the notebooks found at the time of Marcel Proust’s death were those containing Contre Sainte-Beuve, written 1895–1900. Contre Sainte-Beuve is an unusual document—part narrative, part essay—that can be read as an early draft of the first volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu and as a statement of Proust’s aesthetic… Continue Reading Contre Saint-Beuve