Edward Thomas

Biography by Emily Cersonsky Edward Thomas (1878-1917) is best known as a poet, despite the fact that he wrote all of his poems during the years 1914-17, and spent most of his life trying to eke a living from his work as a literary critic and writer of the English countryside. Born in London to… Continue Reading Edward Thomas

The Symbolist Movement in Literature

by Pericles Lewis Symbolism, whose legacy in English literature is best illustrated by the work of William Butler Yeats, was influentially introduced to an English-speaking public by Arthur Symons, translator of Baudelaire and the Italian decadent Gabriele d’Annunzio. Symons wrote of symbolism as “an attempt to spiritualise literature” in his 1899 book The Symbolist Movement… Continue Reading The Symbolist Movement in Literature

A Dream Play

by Pericles Lewis Like Pirandello’s six characters in search of an author, the main figures in August Strindberg‘s A Dream Play (1902) are known by their social roles, rather than names: the Officer, the Lawyer, the Doorkeeper, the Poet. Like Strindberg’s other dream plays, which were inspired in part by Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and When… Continue Reading A Dream Play

August Strindberg

Biography by Pericles Lewis The Swedish playwright August Strindberg (1849-1912) was the great rival of Henrik Ibsen in the Scandinavian theater. Their enmity began with Strindberg’s negative reaction to A Doll’s House, which he, disapprovingly, considered feminist. A noted misogynist, Strindberg wrote two highly accomplished naturalist plays, The Father (1887) and Miss Julie (1888), about… Continue Reading August Strindberg

Tender Buttons

Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons” (1914) offers “studies in description” of objects, in which, as in cubist still life, the object being described seems to be veiled by the medium of description. In the cubism of Picasso and Braque, the veils were the planes into which the painter broke up the canvas. In Stein’s writing, as… Continue Reading Tender Buttons

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

by Pericles Lewis When Gertrude Stein decided to write the story of her life, she did so in the voice of her lover, Alice B. Toklas. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) was written in a more accessible style than much of Stein’s other work, which has led to speculations about the role of… Continue Reading The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

The Making of Americans

by Pericles Lewis Gertrude Stein’s mammoth Making of Americans (1925) is the story of “the old people in a new world, the new people made out of the old.” Like much of her pre-war work, The Making of Americans makes use of patterns of repetition and variation at the sentence level. Stein here uses a… Continue Reading The Making of Americans