“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
57 results for avant garde
Nancy Cunard
avant-garde modernist poets and artists and left-wing political activists.
's mother was American, with French and Irish blood. Her father was an English landowner whose family money had made him a member of the upper class; he was heir to the Cunard shipping-line fortune. Her mother's interest in the arts was a formative feature in Nancy's childhood, as was her growing hostility towards her mother.
spent long periods at Nevill Holt while her mother conducted her extremely active life as a society hostess and patron of the arts. For Nancy, a major fact in her childhood was isolation. Later, she divorced herself increasingly from her mother and her mother's political and social circles, taking her cue from Julia Kristeva
She worked with Tel Quel (an avant-garde little magazine which became notorious for its support for Maoism), whose editorial board she joined in 1971. In New York, in 1976, she became a Permanent Visiting Professor in the French Department at
. The autumn 1977 issue of Tel Quel was devoted to New York. Later academic appointments have included one as visiting professor at the
in 1992.
on George Egerton
One year after the death of her lover avant-garde realist author Knut Hamsun (whose real name was
).
, Chavelita Dunne (later
) fell in love with the Hope Mirrlees
The avant-garde poem Paris, in an edition of 175 copies, as one of its earliest publications.
published
's Iris Tree
Writer, critic, and caricaturist Zuleika Dobson, 1911), a collection of seventeen parodies of contemporary authors (A Christmas Garland, 1912), a collection of short stories (Seven Men, 1919), and numerous essays, many of which he broadcasted for the
. In A Christmas Garland, he parodies authors such as
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
, and
, among others. For each, he writes a story presumably by that author (whose name he fills in with asterixes, such as R*d**rd K*pl*ng), but the story is really a parody of that author's themes and style.He contributed caricatures to the avant-garde journal The Yellow Book, and from 1898 to 1910 he was a drama critic for the Saturday Review. His work is known for its satirical qualities and for expressing a certain nostalgia for the past. He was a close friend of
, and attended the second trial in 1895, at which Wilde was accused of indecency and sodomy.Beerbohm often visited the Trees' family home, Walpole House, and when
lived in Italy, as he did, she visited him frequently. In 1920 he edited a volume of memoirs entitled Herbert Beerbohm Tree: Some Memories of Him and of His Art, to which
contributed.
was
's half-uncle, the youngest son from Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's father's second marriage. Best remembered for his drawings and caricatures of the famous, Beerbohm also wrote one novel (Caroline Blackwood
Writing in The Listener on 3 June 1971 of
's avant-garde feminist play A New Communion for Freaks, Prophets and Witches (and a panel discussion of it), she poured scorn on extremist women. Writing of
's pop psychology book My Secret Garden in October 1975 she poured scorn on women's sexual fantasies.
Rhoda Broughton
The sisters were in general popular in Oxford society, but Rhoda, although at first she dined regularly at the table of scholar , was then ostracized in some circles because of her risqué fiction and satire on Oxford society. Jowett stopped inviting her, and
snubbed her outright, saying he could not bring himself to meet Miss Rhoda Broughton, of whose novels I greatly disapprove. An anti-Broughton camp was established by
, a governor of the
—who maintained an unshakeable misapprehension that the new arrival was in fact
.
understandably resented this hostility, and became quite sensitive to what she termed the cold incivility of
society. She herself, however, was a warm friend to literary undergraduates, as several of them recalled in the Times a hundred years after her birth. Her appearance with
at a meeting of the Oxford
(then something of an avant-garde organization) caused some excitement.
,Bryher
In July 1927 Bryher and Close Up magazine, dedicated to avant-garde film theories and practices. Both as editor and contributor, Bryher used Close Up as a forum to develop and share her ideas on the links between psychological, political, and cinematic expression, as well as the impact of film technology on modern education. The magazine also functioned as a forum for leading European and American directors, photographers, and writers. Inspired by the intellectual dialogue which they were printing, Bryher, MacPherson, and
(along with others) began to experiment with film-making at this time.
founded Kathleen Caffyn
Critic avant-garde and slightly dangerous fashion, as had been recognised in such literary works as
's The Yellow Drawing-Room and
's The Yellow Wallpaper (both written in 1890, though they took a year or two to reach print) and The Yellow Book, launched in April this year, 1894.
has pointed out that at this date the colour yellow signified Ella D'Arcy
As well as a writer, avant-garde Yellow Book, published by
of the
. Sources agree on this, though she herself downplayed her role: I was around a good bit . . . and I helped as I could. But I never was really an editor. Harland was the new magazine's literary editor; the artistic editor was
. Beardsley, however, was dismissed from this position in May 1895, a year into the journal's lifetime and a month after
's arrest, apparently because a wrongly perceived connection with Wilde made hostile crowds attack the building. Some scholars say D'Arcy summoned Harland, who was away, to decide on Beardsley's dismissal.
claims, citing a letter now in the
, USA, that she was responsible for the dismissal in Harland's absence (though this was apparently not what she told
). The ODNB entry on Beardsley does not mention her.
was an editor, assistant to
on the T. S. Eliot
To earn a living for himself and his wife, Eliot became a schoolteacher, a prolific reviewer, an extension lecturer for avant-garde magazine The Egoist.
, and the literary editor of the Elaine Feinstein
Prospect, a literary magazine published this winter at
. She used her editorship (continued until the fifth issue) to introduce an American avant-garde influenced by
, including
and
.
was editor of the first number of Michael Field
Recent criticism, however, has valued this volume highly. is not only that the subject, the observer, is given sexual agency, but that the object is given agency too, and, thus, powerful images of women such as Venus refuse the gaze of the avid and always consuming subject. She sees the authors as putting forward a theory of visuality that values the autonomy of the object, foreseeing the avant-garde revolution of the object.
points to the new possibilities forged by the collection's queer and feminist aesthetic, involving women's agency against traditional readings of the paintings. The poems, she writes, create speaking-spaces for female characters and artists' models—spaces to be perceived by women readers and spectators. Sight and Song thus rewrites the histories of the figures depicted, criticizes the history of art criticism, and conveys new authority upon the possibilities of a female gaze.
argues that its achievement André Gide
As well as his close acquaintance with members of the French avant-garde,
was a friend of the British writers
and
.
Germaine Greer
During this period she added film to stage performance in it droppeth as the gentle rain, a surrealist work by
(who was later an avant-garde film-maker of some fame). Designed to be shown as part of a festival of the absurd along with various well-known plays, the film was banned at the last moment for using bad language, but Greer forwarded her theatrical reputation by appearing in more than one of the plays (and painting scenery). Later she undertook the name role in
's Mother Courage.
Nina Hamnett
deadly serious and determined to get on (whereas most of the girls there were marking time until marriage), studied under an old Scotsman who painted curious pictures of Highlanders and romantic scenes at dawn [which] did not seem to me to mean much, and took a life class with
(who was later knighted). She learned anatomy from a skeleton belonging to a medical student she was in love with. She won a silver medal at Pelham for landscapes, but also first became conscious of her distaste for Classical and Romantic aesthetics, and the appeal of more avant-garde techniques.
book on the French impressionists was a revelation to her. Her suspicion that the RA was not the right fit for her was confirmed at an evening sketching class at the
in Earl'sCourt (later the Royal College of Art), where the students drew from clothed models, workpeople and character models. This window on the real world, which had been witheld from her at Pelham, convinced
that she was far more interested in painting life around her than the carefully composed, idealized version of it beloved by the Academy. She subsequently decided against the free teaching at the Royal Academy and instead persuaded her reluctant grandmother to fund, for a while, her education at the London School of Art.
, Jane Ellen Harrison
Mirrlees had published an avant-garde poem (with the
in 1919) about Paris, where the two women now first lived at the Hotel de Londres and then the American University Women's Club.
H. D.
During 1927-33 HD contributed to the avant-garde, influential film magazine Close Up: Devoted to the Art of Films, which
funded and of which
was the official editor. It had a temperate beige color and a refreshingly noncommercial makeup, which conspired to deflect attention from its iconoclasm. Contributors in the second number included the founding trio, as well as
,
, and (with photographs)
.
This has been edited by Close Up, 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism, 1998.
,
, and
in a volume entitled Violet Hunt
South Lodge, their home since 1896 and a gathering place of both established and avant-garde artists in London.
purchased from her
the lease of Naomi Jacob
Briefly back in London in 1944, she returned to the stage as the mother of a troupe of performing acrobats in a stage adaptation of The Nutmeg Tree.
's novel In 1951 she lectured on the history of the theatre (pouring scorn on
as new-fangled). She was later persuaded by
to star in a surrealistic radio play, The Quest for Corbett, on which he collaborated with
. She took this part although her first reaction had been that she didn't understand a bloody word of this avant-garde tripe, and even though the protagonist, an outsize, celebrity woman writer, was modelled on herself. The play was printed in 1960.
Deborah Levy
This collection feels like a transitional work, between Levy's avant-garde theatre and her later prose fiction. A Little Treatise on Sex and Politics in the 1980s uses various contrasting type-faces and combines prose with verse, lists, dramatic dialogue. The Feminist Companion called the title story a witty and unnerving fable about the nuclear family and nuclear society.
Wyndham Lewis
avant-garde painter and writer. His paintings were shown in the second Post-Impressionist exhibit, held in London in 1912, and for a time he worked with
and the
. (They quarrelled and Lewis left on bad terms, however.) With
and others, Lewis launched the Vorticist movement, an English variant on Italian Futurism that thrived between 1912 and 1915.
was an Penelope Lively
East London, finding billets for evacuees and working with bombed-out families. This experience made her a life-long socialist. She was also an avant-garde artist: a wood-engraver, painter, and sculptor in metal, creator of unique pub signs as well as sculpture for churches.
's aunt
was (like her mother, Penelope's grandmother) a woman of strong social conscience. She worked as a volunteer during the Second World War in Mina Loy
There she gained entrance to the circle of expatriate and avant-garde writers and artists who gathered at the apartment of
. Chief among these was
.
Shena Mackay
It is set in a strange community composed of the residents of an experimental 1930s building called the Nautilus, once avant-garde and now passée. Several of the inhabitants follow or once followed artistic pursuits (including the surviving female partner from the architect couple who idealistically designed the building), but they also include a scrap merchant.