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
Tag: Other Modernist Figures
Arthur Symons
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
Richard Strauss
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
Gertrude Stein
The Making of Americans The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Tender Buttons
Oswald Spengler
by Annie Pfeifer Spengler’s Context and Milieu Oswald Spengler, the German historian and author of the seminal, two-volume work, Decline of the West or Der Untergang des Abendlandes, was born in 1880 to a conservative, petit bourgeois German family. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1904, after having initially failed his doctoral thesis on Heraclitus… Continue Reading Oswald Spengler
The Metropolis and Mental Life
by Matthew Wilsey Although Georg Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life” is a short work, its impact has been profound. Georg Simmel was born on March 1, 1858 in what is now the middle of downtown Berlin.[1] Simmel’s proximity to the metropolis was certainly consequential, as the effects of such an upbringing are reflected in… Continue Reading The Metropolis and Mental Life