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

Salome

by Elizabeth Pugh Salome by Richard Strauss is an operatic retelling of the Biblical story of John the Baptist’s martyrdom, which focuses on the daughter of Herodias. Her strange fascination with John the Baptist ultimately leads to the demise of her and her father in this tragic opera. Strauss based his opera on the one-act… Continue Reading Salome

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 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