1.
Sweden
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Sweden, officially the Kingdom of Sweden, is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. It borders Norway to the west and Finland to the east, at 450,295 square kilometres, Sweden is the third-largest country in the European Union by area, with a total population of 10.0 million. Sweden consequently has a low density of 22 inhabitants per square kilometre. Approximately 85% of the lives in urban areas. Germanic peoples have inhabited Sweden since prehistoric times, emerging into history as the Geats/Götar and Swedes/Svear, Southern Sweden is predominantly agricultural, while the north is heavily forested. Sweden is part of the area of Fennoscandia. The climate is in very mild for its northerly latitude due to significant maritime influence. Today, Sweden is a monarchy and parliamentary democracy, with a monarch as head of state. The capital city is Stockholm, which is also the most populous city in the country, legislative power is vested in the 349-member unicameral Riksdag. Executive power is exercised by the government chaired by the prime minister, Sweden is a unitary state, currently divided into 21 counties and 290 municipalities. Sweden emerged as an independent and unified country during the Middle Ages, in the 17th century, it expanded its territories to form the Swedish Empire, which became one of the great powers of Europe until the early 18th century. Swedish territories outside the Scandinavian Peninsula were gradually lost during the 18th and 19th centuries, the last war in which Sweden was directly involved was in 1814, when Norway was militarily forced into personal union. Since then, Sweden has been at peace, maintaining a policy of neutrality in foreign affairs. The union with Norway was peacefully dissolved in 1905, leading to Swedens current borders, though Sweden was formally neutral through both world wars, Sweden engaged in humanitarian efforts, such as taking in refugees from German-occupied Europe. After the end of the Cold War, Sweden joined the European Union on 1 January 1995 and it is also a member of the United Nations, the Nordic Council, Council of Europe, the World Trade Organization and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Sweden maintains a Nordic social welfare system that provides health care. The modern name Sweden is derived through back-formation from Old English Swēoþēod and this word is derived from Sweon/Sweonas. The Swedish name Sverige literally means Realm of the Swedes, excluding the Geats in Götaland, the etymology of Swedes, and thus Sweden, is generally not agreed upon but may derive from Proto-Germanic Swihoniz meaning ones own, referring to ones own Germanic tribe
2.
Nobel Prize in Literature
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Though individual works are sometimes cited as being particularly noteworthy, here work refers to an authors work as a whole. The Swedish Academy decides who, if anyone, will receive the prize in any given year, the academy announces the name of the chosen laureate in early October. Although the Nobel Prize in Literature has become the worlds most prestigious literature prize, many authors who have won the prize have fallen into obscurity, while others rejected by the jury remain widely studied and read. The prize has become seen as a political one - a peace prize in literary disguise, whose judges are prejudiced against authors with different political tastes to them. Tim Parks has expressed skepticism that it is possible for Swedish professors, as of 2016,16 of the 113 recipients have been of Scandinavian origin. The Academy has often been alleged to be biased towards European, Nobels vague wording for the criteria for the prize has led to recurrent controversy. In the original Swedish, the word translates as either idealistic or ideal. The Nobel Committees interpretation has varied over the years, in recent years, this means a kind of idealism championing human rights on a broad scale. Though Nobel wrote several wills during his lifetime, the last was written a little over a year before he died, Nobel bequeathed 94% of his total assets,31 million Swedish kronor, to establish and endow the five Nobel Prizes. Due to the level of surrounding the will, it was not until 26 April 1897 that the Storting approved it. The executors of his will were Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist, the members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee that were to award the Peace Prize were appointed shortly after the will was approved. The prize-awarding organisations followed, the Karolinska Institutet on 7 June, the Swedish Academy on 9 June, the Nobel Foundation then reached an agreement on guidelines for how the Nobel Prize should be awarded. In 1900, the Nobel Foundations newly created statutes were promulgated by King Oscar II, according to Nobels will, the Royal Swedish Academy was to award the Prize in Literature. Each year, the Swedish Academy sends out requests for nominations of candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature and it is not permitted to nominate oneself. Thousands of requests are sent out each year, and as of 2011 about 220 proposals are returned and these proposals must be received by the Academy by 1 February, after which they are examined by the Nobel Committee. By April, the Academy narrows the field to around twenty candidates, by May, a short list of five names is approved by the Committee. The subsequent four months are spent in reading and reviewing the works of the five candidates. In October, members of the Academy vote and the candidate who receives more than half of the votes is named the Nobel laureate in Literature
3.
Novelist
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A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, Novelists come from a variety of backgrounds and social classes, and frequently this shapes the content of their works. Similarly, some novelists have creative identities derived from their focus on different genres of fiction, such as crime, while many novelists compose fiction to satisfy personal desires, novelists and commentators often ascribe a particular social responsibility or role to novel writers. Many authors use such moral imperatives to justify different approaches to writing, including activism or different approaches to representing reality truthfully. Novelist is a derivative from the term novel describing the writer of novels. However, the OED attributes the primary meaning of a writer of novels as first appearing in the 1633 book East-India Colation by C. The difference between professional and amateur novelists often is the ability to publish. Many people take up writing as a hobby, but the difficulties of completing large scale fictional works of quality prevent the completion of novels. Once authors have completed a novel, they often try to get it published. The publishing industry requires novels to have accessible profitable markets, thus many novelists will self-publish to circumvent the editorial control of publishers, self-publishing has long been an option for writers, with vanity presses printing bound books for a fee paid by the writer. The rise of the Internet and electronic books has made self publishing far less expensive, Novelists apply a number of different methods to writing their novels, relying on a variety of approaches to inspire creativity. Some communities actively encourage amateurs to practice writing novels to develop these unique practices, for example, the internet-based group, National Novel Writing Month, encourages people to write 50, 000-word novels in the month of November, to give novelists practice completing such works. In the 2010 event, over 200,000 people took part – writing a total of over 2.8 billion words, Novelists dont usually publish their first novels until later in life. However, many novelists begin writing at a young age, for example, Iain Banks began writing at eleven, and at sixteen completed his first novel, The Hungarian Lift-Jet, about international arms dealers, in pencil in a larger-than-foolscap log book. However, he was thirty before he published his first novel, the success of this novel enabled Banks to become a full-time novelist. Occasionally, novelists publish as early as their teens, for example, Patrick OBrian published his first novel, Caesar, The Life Story of a Panda-Leopard, at the age of 15, which brought him considerable critical attention. Occasionally, these works will achieve popular success as well, for example, though Christopher Paolinis Eragon, was not a great critical success, but its popularity among readers placed it on the New York Times Childrens Books Best Seller list for 121 weeks. First-time novelists of any age often find themselves unable to get published, because of a number of reasons reflecting the inexperience of the author
4.
Laureate
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In English, the word laureate has come to signify eminence or association with literary awards or military glory. It is also used for winners of the Nobel Prize and the Gandhi Peace Award, in ancient Greece, the laurel was sacred to Apollo and as such sprigs of it were fashioned into a crown or wreath of honor for poets and heroes. This symbolism has been ever since. Laureate letters in old times meant the dispatches announcing a victory, the name of bacca-laureate for a bachelors degree shows a confusion with a supposed etymology from Latin bacca lauri, which, though incorrect, involves the same idea. Jonsons appointment does not seem to have been made as poet laureate. The post then became an institution, though the emoluments varied. Abolition was similarly advocated when Thomas Warton and William Wordsworth died, Wordsworth stipulated, before accepting the honor, that no formal effusions from him should be considered a necessity, but Tennyson was generally happy in his numerous poems of this class. The emoluments of the post have varied, Ben Jonson first received a pension of 100 marks, to Pye an allowance of £27 was made instead of the wine. Tennyson drew £72 a year from the Lord Chamberlains department, glory This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, Chisholm, Hugh, ed. article name needed
5.
Swedish Academy
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The Swedish Academy, founded in 1786 by King Gustav III, is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden. It is known for making the decision on who will be the laureate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy was founded in 1786 by King Gustav III, modelled after the Académie française, it has 18 members. The motto of the Academy is Talent and Taste, the primary purpose of the Academy is to further the purity, strength, and sublimity of the Swedish language. To that end the Academy publishes two dictionaries, the first is a one-volume glossary called Svenska Akademiens ordlista. The second is a dictionary, edited on principles similar to those of the Oxford English Dictionary. The SAOL has reached its 14th edition while the first volume of the SAOB was published in 1898 and, as of 2014, the building now known as the Stockholm Stock Exchange Building was built for the bourgeoisie. The bottom floor was used as an exchange and the upper floor was used for balls, New Years Eve parties. When the academy was founded, the ballroom was the biggest room in Stockholm that could be heated and thus used in the winter, the academy has had its annual meeting there every year since, attended by members of the Swedish royal family. However, it was not until 1914 the academy gained the right to use the floor as their own for all eternity. It is here that the Academy meets and, amongst other business, the latter makes it arguably one of the most influential literary bodies in the world. Dag Hammarskjölds former farm at Backåkra, close to Ystad in southern Sweden, was bought in 1957 as a residence by Hammarskjöld. The south wing of the farm is reserved as a retreat for the 18 members of the Swedish Academy. Since 1901, the Academy has annually decided who will be the laureate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy annually awards nearly 50 different prizes and scholarships, most of them for domestic Swedish authors. Common to all is that they are awarded without competition and without application, the Dobloug Prize, the largest of these at $40,000, is a literature prize awarded for Swedish and Norwegian fiction. Swedish, Stora Priset, literally the Big Prize, was instituted by King Gustav III, the prize, which consists of a single gold medal, is the most prestigious award that can be awarded by the Swedish Academy. It has been awarded to, among others, Selma Lagerlöf, Herbert Tingsten, Astrid Lindgren, Evert Taube, the Academy awards around 50 prizes each year. A person does not have to apply nor compete for the prizes, full list of awards The current permanent secretary of the Academy is Sara Danius, who was preceded by Peter Englund
6.
Europe
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Europe is a continent that comprises the westernmost part of Eurasia. Europe is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, yet the non-oceanic borders of Europe—a concept dating back to classical antiquity—are arbitrary. Europe covers about 10,180,000 square kilometres, or 2% of the Earths surface, politically, Europe is divided into about fifty sovereign states of which the Russian Federation is the largest and most populous, spanning 39% of the continent and comprising 15% of its population. Europe had a population of about 740 million as of 2015. Further from the sea, seasonal differences are more noticeable than close to the coast, Europe, in particular ancient Greece, was the birthplace of Western civilization. The fall of the Western Roman Empire, during the period, marked the end of ancient history. Renaissance humanism, exploration, art, and science led to the modern era, from the Age of Discovery onwards, Europe played a predominant role in global affairs. Between the 16th and 20th centuries, European powers controlled at times the Americas, most of Africa, Oceania. The Industrial Revolution, which began in Great Britain at the end of the 18th century, gave rise to economic, cultural, and social change in Western Europe. During the Cold War, Europe was divided along the Iron Curtain between NATO in the west and the Warsaw Pact in the east, until the revolutions of 1989 and fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1955, the Council of Europe was formed following a speech by Sir Winston Churchill and it includes all states except for Belarus, Kazakhstan and Vatican City. Further European integration by some states led to the formation of the European Union, the EU originated in Western Europe but has been expanding eastward since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The European Anthem is Ode to Joy and states celebrate peace, in classical Greek mythology, Europa is the name of either a Phoenician princess or of a queen of Crete. The name contains the elements εὐρύς, wide, broad and ὤψ eye, broad has been an epithet of Earth herself in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion and the poetry devoted to it. For the second part also the divine attributes of grey-eyed Athena or ox-eyed Hera. The same naming motive according to cartographic convention appears in Greek Ανατολή, Martin Litchfield West stated that phonologically, the match between Europas name and any form of the Semitic word is very poor. Next to these there is also a Proto-Indo-European root *h1regʷos, meaning darkness. Most major world languages use words derived from Eurṓpē or Europa to refer to the continent, in some Turkic languages the originally Persian name Frangistan is used casually in referring to much of Europe, besides official names such as Avrupa or Evropa
7.
Africa
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Africa is the worlds second-largest and second-most-populous continent. At about 30.3 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earths total surface area and 20.4 % of its land area. With 1.2 billion people as of 2016, it accounts for about 16% of the human population. The continent includes Madagascar and various archipelagos and it contains 54 fully recognized sovereign states, nine territories and two de facto independent states with limited or no recognition. Africas population is the youngest amongst all the continents, the age in 2012 was 19.7. Algeria is Africas largest country by area, and Nigeria by population, afarensis, Homo erectus, H. habilis and H. ergaster – with the earliest Homo sapiens found in Ethiopia being dated to circa 200,000 years ago. Africa straddles the equator and encompasses numerous climate areas, it is the continent to stretch from the northern temperate to southern temperate zones. Africa hosts a diversity of ethnicities, cultures and languages. In the late 19th century European countries colonized most of Africa, Africa also varies greatly with regard to environments, economics, historical ties and government systems. However, most present states in Africa originate from a process of decolonization in the 20th century, afri was a Latin name used to refer to the inhabitants of Africa, which in its widest sense referred to all lands south of the Mediterranean. This name seems to have referred to a native Libyan tribe. The name is connected with Hebrew or Phoenician ʿafar dust. The same word may be found in the name of the Banu Ifran from Algeria and Tripolitania, under Roman rule, Carthage became the capital of the province of Africa Proconsularis, which also included the coastal part of modern Libya. The Latin suffix -ica can sometimes be used to denote a land, the later Muslim kingdom of Ifriqiya, modern-day Tunisia, also preserved a form of the name. According to the Romans, Africa lay to the west of Egypt, while Asia was used to refer to Anatolia, as Europeans came to understand the real extent of the continent, the idea of Africa expanded with their knowledge. 25,4, whose descendants, he claimed, had invaded Libya, isidore of Seville in Etymologiae XIV.5.2. Suggests Africa comes from the Latin aprica, meaning sunny, massey, in 1881, stated that Africa is derived from the Egyptian af-rui-ka, meaning to turn toward the opening of the Ka. The Ka is the double of every person and the opening of the Ka refers to a womb or birthplace
8.
Swedish literature
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Swedish literature refers to literature written in the Swedish language or by writers from Sweden. The first literary text from Sweden is the Rök Runestone, carved during the Viking Age circa 800 AD, with the conversion of the land to Christianity around 1100 AD, Sweden entered the Middle Ages, during which monastic writers preferred to use Latin. Therefore, there are only a few texts in the Old Swedish from that period, Swedish literature only flourished when the Swedish language was standardized in the 16th century, a standardization largely due to the full translation of the Bible into Swedish in 1541. This translation is the so-called Gustav Vasa Bible, with improved education and the freedom brought by secularisation, the 17th century saw several notable authors develop the Swedish language further. In Sweden, the period starting in 1880 is known as realism because the writing had a focus on social realism. In the late 19th and early 20th century, other writers included Ola Hansson. In the 1900s, one of the earliest novelists was Hjalmar Söderberg, the early 20th century continued to produce notable authors, such as Selma Lagerlöf and Pär Lagerkvist. In the 1960s, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö collaborated to produce a series of internationally acclaimed detective novels, the most successful writer of detective novels is Henning Mankell, whose works have been translated into 37 languages. In the spy genre, the most successful writer is Jan Guillou. In recent decades, a handful of Swedish writers have established themselves internationally, such as the detective novelist Henning Mankell, also well-known outside of Sweden is the childrens book writer Astrid Lindgren, author of works such as Pippi Longstocking and Emil of Maple Hills. Most runestones had a practical, rather than a literary, purpose and are mainly of interest to historians. Several runic inscriptions are also nonsensical by nature, being used for magical or incantatory purposes, the most notable literary exception is the Rök Runestone from circa 800 AD. It contains the longest known inscription, and encompasses several different passages from sagas and legends, part of it is written in alliterative verse, or fornyrdislag. It is generally regarded as the beginning of Swedish literature, the Christianization of Sweden was one of the main events in the countrys history, and it naturally had an equally profound impact on literature. The Gök runestone is a case in point of how the older literature dissolved and it uses the same imagery as the Ramsund carving, but a Christian cross has been added and the images are combined in a way that completely distorts the internal logic of events. Whatever the reason may have been, the Gök stone illustrates how the pagan heroic mythos was going towards its dissolution, Literature now looked to foreign texts to provide models. By 1200, Christianity was firmly established and a Medieval European culture appeared in Sweden, only a selected few mastered the written language, but little was written down. Complete manuscripts are found from the early 14th century, written in Latin
9.
Charles XII of Sweden
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Charles XII, also Carl, Latinized to Carolus Rex, was the King of Sweden from 1697 to 1718. He belonged to the House of Palatinate-Zweibrücken, a line of the House of Wittelsbach. Charles was the surviving son of Charles XI and Ulrika Eleonora the Elder. He assumed power, after a caretaker government, at the age of fifteen. Leading the Swedish army against the alliance Charles won multiple victories despite being usually significantly outnumbered, a major victory over a Russian army some three times the size in 1700 at the Battle of Narva compelled Peter the Great to sue for peace which Charles then rejected. Russia was now the remaining hostile power. The defeat was followed by Surrender at Perevolochna, two campaigns met with frustration and ultimate failure, concluding with his death at the Siege of Fredriksten in 1718. At the time, most of the Swedish Empire was under military occupation. This situation was later formalized, albeit moderated in the subsequent Treaty of Nystad, Charles was an exceptionally skilled military leader and tactician as well as an able politician, credited with introducing important tax and legal reforms. With the war consuming more than half his life and nearly all his reign, Charles, like all kings, was styled by a royal title, which combined all his titles into one single phrase. The fact that Charles was crowned as Charles XII does not mean that he was the 12th king of Sweden by that name, Swedish kings Erik XIV and Charles IX gave themselves numerals after studying a mythological history of Sweden. He was actually the 6th King Charles, the non-mathematic numbering tradition continues with the current King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, being counted as the equivalent of Charles XVI. In late 1699 Charles sent a detachment to reinforce his brother-in-law Duke Frederick IV of Holstein-Gottorp. A Saxon army simultaneously invaded Swedish Livonia and in February 1700 invested Riga, Russia also declared war, but stopped short of an attack on Swedish Ingria until September 1700. Leading a force of 8,000 and 43 ships in an invasion of Zealand, Charles rapidly compelled the Danes to submit to the Peace of Travendal in August 1700, Russia had opened their part of the war by invading the Swedish-held territories of Livonia and Estonia. Charles countered this by attacking the Russian besiegers at the Battle of Narva, the Russians outnumbered the Swedish army of ten thousand men by almost four to one. Charles attacked under cover of a blizzard, effectively split the Russian army in two and won the battle, many of Peters troops who fled the battlefield drowned in the Narva River. The total number of Russian fatalities reached about 10,000 at the end of the battle, while the Swedish forces lost 667 men, Charles did not pursue the Russian army
10.
August Strindberg
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Johan August Strindberg was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed innovative forms of action, language. He is considered the father of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room has frequently described as the first modern Swedish novel. In Sweden, Strindberg is known as an essayist, painter, poet, and especially as a novelist and playwright, but in other countries he is known mostly as a playwright. The Royal Theatre rejected his first major play, Master Olof, in 1872, it was not until 1881, at the age of thirty-two, that its première at the New Theatre gave him his theatrical breakthrough. In Miss Julie, characterisation replaces plot as the predominant dramatic element and the role of heredity. During the 1890s he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments, a series of psychotic attacks between 1894 and 1896 led to his hospitalization and return to Sweden. Under the influence of the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, he resolved after his recovery to become the Zola of the Occult, in 1898 he returned to play-writing with To Damascus, which, like The Great Highway, is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage. He also returned to writing historical drama, the genre with which he had begun his play-writing career and he helped to run the Intimate Theatre from 1907, a small-scale theatre, modeled on Max Reinhardts Kammerspielhaus, that staged his chamber plays. Strindberg was born on 22 January 1849 in Stockholm, Sweden, in his autobiographical novel The Son of a Servant, Strindberg describes a childhood affected by emotional insecurity, poverty, religious fanaticism and neglect. When he was seven, Strindberg moved to Norrtullsgatan on the northern, a year later the family moved near to Sabbatsberg, where they stayed for three years before returning to Norrtullsgatan. He attended a school in Klara for four years, an experience that haunted him in his adult life. He was moved to the school in Jakob in 1860, which he found far more pleasant, in the autumn of 1861, he was moved to the Stockholm Lyceum, a progressive private school for middle-class boys, where he remained for six years. As a child he had a keen interest in science, photography. His mother, Strindberg recalled later with bitterness, always resented her sons intelligence and she died when he was thirteen, and although his grief lasted for only three months, in later life he came to feel a sense of loss and longing for an idealized maternal figure. Less than a year after her death, his father married the childrens governess, according to his sisters, Strindberg came to regard them as his worst enemies. He passed his exam in May 1867 and enrolled at the Uppsala University. Strindberg spent the few years in Uppsala and Stockholm, alternately studying for exams
11.
Oscar Levertin
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Oscar Ivar Levertin was a Swedish poet, critic and literary historian. Levertin was a dominant voice of the Swedish cultural scene from 1897, in his own short story collections in the 1880s, Levertin first aligned himself with the Naturalist school of fiction of which August Strindberg was the most prominent member. In 1888, however, the previously unheard Swedish romantic poetic voice of Verner von Heidenstams Vallfart och vandringsår changed Levertins stylistic ideals, together with Heidenstams work, Levertins first collection of poetry, Legender och visor, sparked an 1890s Swedish fashion for historical, particularly medieval, literature. Unlike Heidenstams and much other Swedish poetry of the 1890s, Legender och visor is free from Swedish nationalism and this volume remains highly regarded today, though no longer widely read. Poems from it, including the ballad Flores och Blanzeflor, remained set texts in Swedish schools into the 1970s, listen to a free MP3 recording of Wilhelm Stenhammars music to Levertins poem Vårnatt with Hemavans Sommarkör 2006
12.
Encyclopedia Americana
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Encyclopedia Americana is one of the largest general encyclopedias in the English language. Following the acquisition of Grolier in 2000, the encyclopedia has been produced by Scholastic, the encyclopedia has more than 45,000 articles, most of them more than 500 words and many running to considerable length. The works coverage of American and Canadian geography and history has been a traditional strength, most articles are signed by their contributors. Long available as a 30-volume print set, the Encyclopedia Americana is now marketed as an online encyclopedia requiring a subscription, in March 2008, Scholastic said that print sales remained good but that the company was still deciding on the future of the print edition. The company did not produce an edition in 2007, a change from its previous approach of releasing a revised print edition each year, the most recent print edition of the Encyclopedia Americana was published in 2006. The online version of the Encyclopedia Americana, first introduced in 1997, continues to be updated and this work, like the print set from which it is derived, is designed for high school and first-year college students along with public library users. Grolier Online is not available to individual subscribers, francis Lieber, a German political exile, who came to Boston, Massachusetts in 1827, began publication of Encyclopedia Americana in 1829. The 13 volumes of the first edition were completed in 1833, just before the beginning of the 20th century Richard S. Some of the old material was carried over into the new encyclopedia, the short article method of Brockhaus was continued. Thus in 1902 a new version in 16 volumes that carried some of the old material was published. The magazines editor, Frederick Converse Beach, was editor-in-chief, and was said to be assisted by hundreds of eminent scholars, the relationship with Scientific American was terminated in 1911. From 1907 to 1912, the work was published as The Americana, a major new edition appeared in 1918–20 in 30 volumes, with George Edwin Rines as editor-in-chief. An Annual or Yearbook was also published each year beginning in 1923, the encyclopedia was purchased by Grolier in 1945. Sales during this period were accomplished primarily through mail-order and door-to-door operations, telemarketing and third-party distribution through their Lexicon division added to sales volumes in the 1970s. By the late 1970s, Grolier had moved its operations to Danbury, in 1988 Grolier was purchased by the French media company Hachette, which owned a well-known French-language encyclopedia, the Hachette Encyclopedia. Hachette was later absorbed by the French conglomerate the Lagardère Group, a CD-ROM version of the encyclopedia was published in 1995. Although the text and images were stored on separate disks, it was in keeping with current at the time. More importantly, the work had been digitized, allowing for release of a version in 1997
13.
Project Gutenberg
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Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks. It was founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital library, most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books. The project tries to make these as free as possible, in long-lasting, as of 3 October 2015, Project Gutenberg reached 50,000 items in its collection. The releases are available in plain text but, wherever possible, other formats are included, such as HTML, PDF, EPUB, MOBI, most releases are in the English language, but many non-English works are also available. There are multiple affiliated projects that are providing additional content, including regional, Project Gutenberg is also closely affiliated with Distributed Proofreaders, an Internet-based community for proofreading scanned texts. Project Gutenberg was started by Michael Hart in 1971 with the digitization of the United States Declaration of Independence, Hart, a student at the University of Illinois, obtained access to a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer in the universitys Materials Research Lab. Through friendly operators, he received an account with an unlimited amount of computer time. Hart has said he wanted to back this gift by doing something that could be considered to be of great value. His initial goal was to make the 10,000 most consulted books available to the public at little or no charge and this particular computer was one of the 15 nodes on ARPANET, the computer network that would become the Internet. Hart believed that computers would one day be accessible to the general public and he used a copy of the United States Declaration of Independence in his backpack, and this became the first Project Gutenberg e-text. He named the project after Johannes Gutenberg, the fifteenth century German printer who propelled the movable type printing press revolution, by the mid-1990s, Hart was running Project Gutenberg from Illinois Benedictine College. More volunteers had joined the effort, all of the text was entered manually until 1989 when image scanners and optical character recognition software improved and became more widely available, which made book scanning more feasible. Hart later came to an arrangement with Carnegie Mellon University, which agreed to administer Project Gutenbergs finances, as the volume of e-texts increased, volunteers began to take over the projects day-to-day operations that Hart had run. Starting in 2004, an online catalog made Project Gutenberg content easier to browse, access. Project Gutenberg is now hosted by ibiblio at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Italian volunteer Pietro Di Miceli developed and administered the first Project Gutenberg website and started the development of the Project online Catalog. In his ten years in this role, the Project web pages won a number of awards, often being featured in best of the Web listings, Hart died on 6 September 2011 at his home in Urbana, Illinois at the age of 64. In 2000, a corporation, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Long-time Project Gutenberg volunteer Gregory Newby became the foundations first CEO, also in 2000, Charles Franks founded Distributed Proofreaders, which allowed the proofreading of scanned texts to be distributed among many volunteers over the Internet
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Internet Archive
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The Internet Archive is a San Francisco–based nonprofit digital library with the stated mission of universal access to all knowledge. As of October 2016, its collection topped 15 petabytes, in addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating for a free and open Internet. Its web archive, the Wayback Machine, contains over 150 billion web captures, the Archive also oversees one of the worlds largest book digitization projects. Founded by Brewster Kahle in May 1996, the Archive is a 501 nonprofit operating in the United States. It has a budget of $10 million, derived from a variety of sources, revenue from its Web crawling services, various partnerships, grants, donations. Its headquarters are in San Francisco, California, where about 30 of its 200 employees work, Most of its staff work in its book-scanning centers. The Archive has data centers in three Californian cities, San Francisco, Redwood City, and Richmond, the Archive is a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium and was officially designated as a library by the State of California in 2007. Brewster Kahle founded the Archive in 1996 at around the time that he began the for-profit web crawling company Alexa Internet. In October 1996, the Internet Archive had begun to archive and preserve the World Wide Web in large quantities, the archived content wasnt available to the general public until 2001, when it developed the Wayback Machine. In late 1999, the Archive expanded its collections beyond the Web archive, Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software. It hosts a number of projects, the NASA Images Archive, the contract crawling service Archive-It. According to its web site, Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture, without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form, the Archives mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars. In August 2012, the Archive announced that it has added BitTorrent to its file download options for over 1.3 million existing files, on November 6,2013, the Internet Archives headquarters in San Franciscos Richmond District caught fire, destroying equipment and damaging some nearby apartments. The nonprofit Archive sought donations to cover the estimated $600,000 in damage, in November 2016, Kahle announced that the Internet Archive was building the Internet Archive of Canada, a copy of the archive to be based somewhere in the country of Canada. The announcement received widespread coverage due to the implication that the decision to build an archive in a foreign country was because of the upcoming presidency of Donald Trump. Kahle was quoted as saying that on November 9th in America and it was a firm reminder that institutions like ours, built for the long-term, need to design for change. For us, it means keeping our cultural materials safe, private and it means preparing for a Web that may face greater restrictions
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Sully Prudhomme
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René François Armand Prudhomme was a French poet and essayist. He was the first ever winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901, born in Paris, Prudhomme originally studied to be an engineer, but turned to philosophy and later to poetry, he declared it as his intention to create scientific poetry for modern times. In character sincere and melancholic, he was linked to the Parnassus school, although, at the same time, Prudhomme was born to a French shopkeeper. Prudhomme attended the Lycée Bonaparte, but eye trouble interrupted his studies and he worked for a while in the Creusot region for the Schneider steel foundry, and then began studying law in a notarys office. The favourable reception of his poems by the Conférence La Bruyère encouraged him to begin a literary career. His first collection, Stances et Poèmes, was praised by Sainte-Beuve and it included his most famous poem, Le vase brisé. He published more poetry before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War and this war, which he discussed in Impressions de la guerre and La France, permanently damaged his health. The inspiration was clearly Lucretiuss De rerum natura, for the first book of which he made a verse translation and his philosophy was expressed in La Justice and Le Bonheur. The extreme economy of means employed in these poems has, however and he was elected to the Académie française in 1881. Another distinction, Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, was to follow in 1895, after, Le Bonheur, Prudhomme turned from poetry to write essays on aesthetics and philosophy. The first writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, he devoted the bulk of the money he received to the creation of a prize awarded by the Société des gens de lettres. He also founded, in 1902, the Société des poètes français with Jose-Maria de Heredia, at the end of his life, his poor health forced him to live almost as a recluse at Châtenay-Malabry, suffering attacks of paralysis while continuing to work on essays. He died suddenly on 6 September 1907, and was buried at Père-Lachaise in Paris,1901, Testament poétique 1905, La vraie religion selon Pascal 1922, Journal intime, lettres-pensée Gale Contemporary Authors Online, from the Gale Biography Resource Center database Petri Liukkonen. Archived from the original on 4 July 2013
16.
Theodor Mommsen
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His work regarding Roman history is still of fundamental importance for contemporary research. He was also a prominent German politician, as a member of the Prussian and German parliaments and his works on Roman law and on the law of obligations had a significant impact on the German civil code. Mommsen was born to German parents in Garding in the Duchy of Schleswig in 1817, then ruled by the king of Denmark, and grew up in Bad Oldesloe in Holstein and he studied mostly at home, though he attended the gymnasium Christianeum in Altona for four years. He studied Greek and Latin and received his diploma in 1837, as he could not afford to study at Göttingen, he enrolled at the University of Kiel. Mommsen studied jurisprudence at Kiel from 1838 to 1843, finishing his studies with the degree of Doctor of Roman Law, during this time he was the roommate of Theodor Storm, who was later to become a renowned poet. Together with Mommsens brother Tycho, the three friends even published a collection of poems, thanks to a royal Danish grant, Mommsen was able to visit France and Italy to study preserved classical Roman inscriptions. During the revolution of 1848 he worked as a war correspondent in then-Danish Rendsburg, supporting the German annexation of Schleswig-Holstein, having been forced to leave the country by the Danes, he became a professor of law in the same year at the University of Leipzig. When Mommsen protested against the new constitution of Saxony in 1851, however, the next year he obtained a professorship in Roman law at the University of Zurich and then spent a couple of years in exile. In 1854 he became a professor of law at the University of Breslau where he met Jakob Bernays, Mommsen became a research professor at the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1857. He later helped to create and manage the German Archaeological Institute in Rome. In 1858 Mommsen was appointed a member of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, and he became professor of Roman History at the University of Berlin in 1861. At 2 a. m. on 7 July 1880 a fire occurred in the upper floor workroom-library of Mommsens house at Marchstraße 6 in Berlin, after being burned while attempting to remove valuable papers, he was restrained from returning to the blazing house. Several old manuscripts were burnt to ashes, including Manuscript 0.4.36, there is information that the important Manuscript of Jordanes from Heidelberg University library was burnt. Two other important manuscripts, from Brussels and Halle, were also destroyed, Mommsen was an indefatigable worker who rose at five to do research in his library. People often saw him reading whilst walking in the streets, Mommsen had sixteen children with his wife Marie. Their oldest daughter Maria married Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, the great Classics scholar and their grandson Theodor Ernst Mommsen became a professor of medieval history in the United States. Two of the great-grandsons, Hans Mommsen and Wolfgang Mommsen, were prominent German historians, Mommsen published over 1,500 works, and effectively established a new framework for the systematic study of Roman history. He pioneered epigraphy, the study of inscriptions in material artifacts
17.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
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Henryk Adam Aleksander Pius Sienkiewicz was a Polish journalist, novelist and the Nobel Prize laureate. He is best remembered for his novels, especially for his internationally known best-seller Quo Vadis. Born into an impoverished Polish noble family in Russian-ruled Congress Poland, in the late 1860s he began publishing journalistic, in the late 1870s he traveled to the United States, sending back travel essays that won him popularity with Polish readers. In the 1880s he began serializing novels that further increased his popularity, many of his novels remain in print. The Trilogy and Quo Vadis have been filmed, the several times. Sienkiewicz was born on 5 May 1846 in Wola Okrzejska, now a village in the part of eastern Polish region of Lubelskie. His family were impoverished Polish nobles, on his fathers side deriving from Tatars who had settled in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and his parents were Józef Sienkiewicz and Stefania, née Cieciszowska. He had five siblings, a brother, Kazimierz, and four sisters, Aniela, Helena. His family were entitled to use the Polish Oszyk coat of arms, Wola Okrzejska belonged to the writers maternal grandmother, Felicjana Cieciszowska. His family moved several times, and young Henryk spent his childhood on family estates in Grabowce Górne, Wężyczyn, in September 1858 he began his education in Warsaw, where the family would finally settle in 1861, having bought a tenement house in eastern Warsaws Praga district. He received relatively poor school grades except in the humanities, notably Polish language, due to the hard times, 19-year-old Sienkiewicz took a job as tutor to the Weyher family in Płońsk. It was probably in this period that he wrote his first novel, Ofiara and he also worked on his first novel to be published, Na marne. He completed extramural secondary-school classes, and in 1866 he received his secondary-school diploma, Little is known about this period of his life, other than that he moved out of his parents home, tutored part-time, and lived in poverty. His situation improved somewhat in 1868 when he became tutor to the princely Woroniecki family, in 1867 he wrote a rhymed piece, Sielanka Młodości, which was rejected by Tygodnik Ilustrowany. He completed his university studies in 1871, though he failed to receive a diploma because he did not pass the examination in Greek language, Sienkiewicz also wrote for Gazeta Polska and Niwa, under the pen name Litwos. In 1873 he began writing a column, Bez tytułu, in The Polish Gazette, in 1874 a column, Sprawy bieżące for Niwa and he also collaborated on a Polish translation, published in 1874, of Victor Hugos last novel, Ninety-Three. In June that year, he became co-owner of Niwa, meanwhile, in 1872, he had debuted as a fiction writer with his short novel Na marne, published in the magazine Wieniec. This was followed by Humoreski z teki Woroszyłły, Stary Sługa, Hania, the last three are known as the Little Trilogy
18.
Rudyard Kipling
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Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. Kiplings works of fiction include The Jungle Book, Kim, and many short stories and his poems include Mandalay, Gunga Din, The Gods of the Copybook Headings, The White Mans Burden, and If—. Kipling was one of the most popular writers in the United Kingdom, Henry James said, Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known. In 1907, at the age of 42, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize and its youngest recipient to date. He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on occasions for a knighthood. Kiplings subsequent reputation has changed according to the political and social climate of the age, George Orwell called him a prophet of British imperialism. Literary critic Douglas Kerr wrote, is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary, but as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and a recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts. Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865, in Bombay, in the Bombay Presidency of British India, to Alice Kipling, Alice was a vivacious woman about whom Lord Dufferin would say, Dullness and Mrs. Kipling cannot exist in the same room. Lockwood Kipling, a sculptor and pottery designer, was the Principal, John Lockwood and Alice had met in 1863 and courted at Rudyard Lake in Rudyard, Staffordshire, England. They married and moved to India in 1865 and they had been so moved by the beauty of the Rudyard Lake area that when their first child was born they referenced it when naming him. Alices sister Georgiana was married to painter Edward Burne-Jones, and her sister Agnes was married to painter Edward Poynter, Kiplings most famous relative was his first cousin, Stanley Baldwin, who was Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom three times in the 1920s and 1930s. Kiplings birth home on the campus of the J J School of Art in Bombay for many years was used as the Deans residence. Although the cottage bears a plaque stating that this is the site where Kipling was born, the original cottage may have torn down decades ago. Some historians and conservationists are also of the view that the bungalow merely marks a site close to the home of his birth, as the bungalow was built in 1882, Kipling seems to have also said so to the dean when he visited J J School in the 1930s. Kipling was to write of Bombay, According to Bernice M. Murphy, Kipling’s parents considered themselves Anglo-Indians and so too would their son, complex issues of identity and national allegiance would become prominent features in his fiction. So one spoke English, haltingly translated out of the idiom that one thought. Kiplings days of light and darkness in Bombay ended when he was five years old
19.
Rudolf Christoph Eucken
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Rudolf Christoph Eucken was a German philosopher. Eucken was born on 5 January 1846 in Aurich, then in the Kingdom of Hanover and his father, Ammo Becker Eucken died when he was a child, and he was brought up by his mother, Ida Maria. He was educated at Aurich, where one of his teachers was the classical philologist and he studied at Göttingen University, where Hermann Lotze was one of his teachers, and Berlin University. In the latter place, Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg was a professor whose ethical tendencies, Eucken received his Ph. D. in classical philology and ancient history at Göttingen University in 1866 with a dissertation under the title De Aristotelis dicendi ratione. However, the bent of his mind was definitely towards the side of theology. He stayed there until 1874 when he took up a position at the University of Jena. He stayed there until he retired in 1920, from 1913–1914 he served as guest lecturer at New York University. During World War I, Eucken, like many of his academic colleagues, Euckens philosophical work is partly historical and partly constructive, the former side being predominant in his earlier, the latter in his later works. Their most striking feature is the organic relationship between the two parts. The aim of the works is to show the necessary connexion between philosophical concepts and the age to which they belong, the same idea is at the root of his constructive speculation. All philosophy is philosophy of life, the development of a new culture, not mere intellectualism and this practical idealism Eucken described by the term ethical activism. In accordance with this principle, Eucken gave considerable attention to social and educational problems and he maintained that humans have souls, and that they are therefore at the junction between nature and spirit. He believed that people should overcome their non-spiritual nature by continuous efforts to achieve a life, another aspect of his ethical activism. He married Irene Passow in 1882 and had a daughter and two sons and his son Walter Eucken became a famous founder of ordoliberal thought in economics. His son Arnold Eucken was a chemist/physicist, Rudolf Eucken died on 15 September 1926 in Jena at the age of 80. Main Currents of Modern Thought, A Study of the Spiritual and Intellectual Movements of the Present Day, the Meaning and Value of Life, A. and C. Collected Essays, T. Fisher Unwin,1914 and he delivered lectures in England in 1911 and spent six months lecturing at Harvard University and elsewhere in the United States in 1912–1913. Rudolf Eucken, His Philosophy and Influence, Charles Scribners Sons,1913, Rudolf Euckens Philosophy, The Dublin Review, Vol. CLV, July/October,1914
20.
Paul Heyse
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Paul Johann Ludwig von Heyse was a distinguished German writer and translator. A member of two important literary societies, the Tunnel über der Spree in Berlin and Die Krokodile in Munich, he wrote novels, poetry,177 short stories, the sum of Heyses many and varied productions made him a dominant figure among German men of letters. Wirsen, one of the Nobel judges, said that Germany has not had a literary genius since Goethe. Heyse is the fifth oldest laureate in literature, after Doris Lessing, Theodor Mommsen, Alice Munro, paul Heyse was born on 15 March 1830 in Heiliggeiststraße, Berlin. His paternal grandfather Johann Christian August Heyse, was a famous German grammarian, Heyse attended the renamed Friedrich-Wilhelms-Gymnasium until 1847. He was later remembered as a model student, after leaving school Heyse began studying classical philology. He met Jacob Burckhardt, Adolph Menzel, Theodor Fontane and Theodor Storm, frühlingsanfang 1848, the first of Heyses poems to see print, expressed his enthusiasm for the recent Revolution. After a brief excursion to see the student militias he returned home without joining them, apparently out of consideration for the concerns of his parents and friends. Having studied for two years at the University of Berlin he left for Bonn in April 1849 in order to art history. Heyses first book, Der Jungbrunnen was published anonymously by his father that year as was his tragedy Francesca von Rimini. About the same time, Heyse received from the publisher Alexander Duncker a manuscript by the then-unknown Theodor Storm, Heyses enthusiastic critique of Sommergeschichten und Lieder laid the foundations of their future friendship. In 1851 Heyse won a contest held by the members of the Tunnel for the ballad Das Tal von Espigno, wolf also set poems from Heyses collection Italienisches Liederbuch of 1860. Throughout his career Heyse worked as a translator, above all of Italian literature, in May 1852 Heyse was awarded a doctorate for his work on the troubadours, and a Prussian scholarship allowed him to depart for Italy to look for old Provençal manuscripts. He made friends with Arnold Böcklin and Joseph Victor von Scheffel but was banned from the Vatican library after being discovered copying passages from unpublished manuscripts, much of his new writing appeared in the Argo, the yearbook of the Rütli writers. Emanuel Geibel persuaded the King of Bavaria, Maximilian II, to grant Heyse a titular professorship in Munich, Heyse was thus appointed professor of Romance philology, although he never taught at that citys university. After his marriage on 15 May to Margarete Kugler he arrived in Munich on 25 May 1854, in December Heyse began a long correspondence with Eduard Mörike. On 22 August 1855 Heyses first son, Franz, was born, Heyse would have four children by his first marriage, Franz, Julie or Lulu, Ernst and Clara. On 30 September 1862, his wife Margarete died in Meran of a lung illness and he completed the historical drama, Ludwig der Bayer – a Bavarian period piece which Maximilian II had long been eager to see – but its theatrical production was a failure
21.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who was Flemish but wrote in French. The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life and his plays form an important part of the Symbolist movement. In later life, Maeterlinck committed plagiarism, Maeterlinck was born in Ghent, Belgium, to a wealthy, French-speaking family. His mother, Mathilde Colette Françoise, came from a wealthy family and his father, Polydore, was a notary who enjoyed tending the greenhouses on their property. In September 1874 he was sent to the Jesuit College of Sainte-Barbe and his experiences at this school influenced his distaste for the Catholic Church and organized religion. He had written poems and short novels during his studies, after finishing his law studies at the University of Ghent in 1885, he spent a few months in Paris, France. He met some members of the new Symbolism movement, Villiers de lIsle Adam in particular, Maeterlinck instantly became a public figure when his first play, Princess Maleine, received enthusiastic praise from Octave Mirbeau, the literary critic of Le Figaro in August 1890. In the following years, he wrote a series of symbolist plays characterized by fatalism and mysticism, most importantly Intruder, The Blind and Pelléas and he had a relationship with the singer and actress Georgette Leblanc from 1895 until 1918. Leblanc influenced his work for the two decades. With the play Aglavaine and Sélysette Maeterlinck began to create characters, especially female characters, Leblanc performed these female characters on stage. Even though mysticism and metaphysics influenced his work throughout his career, in 1895, with his parents frowning upon his open relationship with an actress, Maeterlinck and Leblanc moved to the district of Passy in Paris. The Catholic Church was unwilling to grant her a divorce from her Spanish husband and they frequently entertained guests, including Mirbeau, Jean Lorrain, and Paul Fort. They spent their summers in Normandy, during this period, Maeterlinck published his Twelve Songs, The Treasure of the Humble, The Life of the Bee, and Ariadne and Bluebeard. In 1903, Maeterlinck received the Triennial Prize for Dramatic Literature from the Belgian government. During this period, and down to the Great War, he was looked up to, throughout Europe, as a great sage. In 1906, Maeterlinck and Leblanc moved to a villa in Grasse and he spent his hours meditating and walking. As he emotionally pulled away from Leblanc, he entered a state of depression, diagnosed with neurasthenia, he rented the Benedictine Abbey of St. Wandrille in Normandy to help him relax. By renting the abbey he rescued it from the desecration of being sold and used as a chemical factory, Leblanc would often walk around in the garb of an abbess, he would wear roller skates as he moved about the house
22.
Gerhart Hauptmann
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Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann was a German dramatist and novelist. He is counted among the most important promoters of literary naturalism and he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1912. Gerhart Hauptmann was born in 1862 in Obersalzbrunn, now known as Szczawno-Zdrój and his parents were the Robert and Marie Hauptmann, who ran a hotel in the area. As a youth, Hauptmann had a reputation of being loose with the truth, beginning in 1868, he attended the village school and then, in 1874, the Realschule in Breslau for which he had only barely passed the qualifying exam. Hauptmann had difficulties adjusting himself to his new surroundings in the city and he lived, along with his brother Carl, in a somewhat run-down student boarding house before finding lodging with a pastor. He also ran into problems with the Prussian-influenced school, above all the strictness of the teachers and the better treatment of his noble classmates. His dislike and numerous illness which kept him from attending class, over time, he came to appreciate Breslau because of the opportunity to visit the theater. In the spring of 1878, Hauptmann left the Realschule to learn agriculture on his uncles farm in Lohnig, after a year and a half, however, he had to break off his training. He was not physically prepared for the work and he had a contracted a lung ailment that troubled him for the next twenty months. After he failed to pass an entry exam for the Prussian Army, Hauptmann entered the sculpture school at the Royal Art. There he met Josef Block who became a lifelong friend, for his brothers wedding, he wrote a short play, Liebesfrühling, that was performed on the night before the wedding. Also at the wedding, he met the sister, Marie Thienemann. After he left Jena, Marie financed a Mediterranean trip, which he undertook with his brother Carl, on the trip, he decided to settle in Rome as a sculptor, however he had little success. His attempt to himself as part of Romes German expatriate community also failed. Hauptmann returned to Germany, disappointed and began a stint at the Royal Academy in Dresden before beginning to study history at Humboldt University of Berlin. While there, he devoted his interests to the rather than to his studies. In 1891 he moved to Schreiberhau in Silesia and it was followed by The Reconciliation, Lonely People and The Weavers, a powerful drama depicting the uprising of the Silesian weavers in 1844 for which he is best known outside of Germany. Hauptmann married Marie Theienemann in Radebeul on May 5,1885, in July, they took their honeymoon to Rügen along with Carl and his wife, Maries sister, Martha
23.
Rabindranath Tagore
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Author of Gitanjali and its profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. Sometimes referred to as the Bard of Bengal, Tagores poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial, however, his elegant prose, a Pirali Brahmin from Calcutta with ancestral gentry roots in Jessore, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old. At the age of sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha, by 1877 he graduated to his first short stories and dramas, published under his real name. As a humanist, universalist internationalist, and ardent anti-nationalist, he denounced the British Raj, Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to topics political and personal, Gitanjali, Gora and Ghare-Baire are his best-known works, and his verse, short stories, and novels were acclaimed—or panned—for their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and unnatural contemplation. His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems, Indias Jana Gana Mana and Bangladeshs Amar Shonar Bangla, the Sri Lankan national anthem was inspired by his work. The youngest of thirteen surviving children, Tagore was born on 7 May 1861 in the Jorasanko mansion in Calcutta to Debendranath Tagore, Tagore was raised mostly by servants, his mother had died in his early childhood and his father travelled widely. The Tagore family was at the forefront of the Bengal renaissance and they hosted the publication of literary magazines, theatre and recitals of Bengali and Western classical music featured there regularly. Tagores father invited several professional Dhrupad musicians to stay in the house, Tagores oldest brother Dwijendranath was a philosopher and poet. Another brother, Satyendranath, was the first Indian appointed to the elite, yet another brother, Jyotirindranath, was a musician, composer, and playwright. His sister Swarnakumari became a novelist, jyotirindranaths wife Kadambari Devi, slightly older than Tagore, was a dear friend and powerful influence. Her abrupt suicide in 1884, soon after he married, left him for years profoundly distraught, Tagore largely avoided classroom schooling and preferred to roam the manor or nearby Bolpur and Panihati, idylls which the family visited. His brother Hemendranath tutored and physically conditioned him—by having him swim the Ganges or trek through hills, by gymnastics and he learned drawing, anatomy, geography and history, literature, mathematics, Sanskrit, and English—his least favourite subject. Tagore loathed formal education—his scholarly travails at the local Presidency College spanned a single day, there Tagore read biographies, studied history, astronomy, modern science, and Sanskrit, and examined the classical poetry of Kālidāsa. Tagore returned to Jorosanko and completed a set of works by 1877. As a joke, he claimed that these were the lost works of a newly discovered 17th-century Vaiṣṇava poet Bhānusiṃha, regional experts accepted them as the lost works of Bhānusiṃha. He debuted in the genre in Bengali with Bhikharini. Published in the year, Sandhya Sangit includes the poem Nirjharer Swapnabhanga
24.
Romain Rolland
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Rolland was born in Clamecy, Nièvre into a family that had both wealthy townspeople and farmers in its lineage. Writing introspectively in his Voyage intérieur, he himself as a representative of an antique species. He would cast these ancestors in Colas Breugnon, accepted to the École normale supérieure in 1886, he first studied philosophy, but his independence of spirit led him to abandon that so as not to submit to the dominant ideology. When he returned to France in 1895, he received his degree with his thesis Les origines du théâtre lyrique moderne. Histoire de l’opéra en Europe avant Lulli et Scarlatti, for the next two decades, he taught at various lycées in Paris before directing the newly established music school École des Hautes Études Sociales from 1902–11. In 1903 he was appointed to the first chair of history at the Sorbonne. His first book was published in 1902, when he was 36 years old, through his advocacy for a peoples theatre, he made a significant contribution towards the democratization of the theatre. As a humanist, he embraced the work of the philosophers of India, Rolland was strongly influenced by the Vedanta philosophy of India, primarily through the works of Swami Vivekananda. A demanding, yet timid, young man, he did not like teaching and he was not indifferent to youth, Jean-Christophe, Olivier and their friends, the heroes of his novels, are young people. But with real-life persons, youths as well as adults, Rolland maintained only a distant relationship and he was first and foremost a writer. Assured that literature would provide him with a modest income, he resigned from the university in 1912, Romain Rolland was a lifelong pacifist. He was one of the few major French writers to retain his pacifist internationalist values and he protested against the first World War in Au-dessus de la mêlée, Above the Battle. In 1924, his book on Gandhi contributed to the Indian nonviolent leaders reputation, in 1932 Rolland was among the first members of the World Committee Against War and Fascism, organized by Willi Münzenberg. Rolland criticized the control Münzenberg assumed over the committee and was against it being based in Berlin, Rolland moved to Villeneuve, on the shores of Lac Léman to devote himself to writing. His life was interrupted by health problems, and by travels to art exhibitions and his voyage to Moscow, on the invitation of Maxim Gorky, was an opportunity to meet Joseph Stalin, whom he considered the greatest man of his time. Rolland served unofficially as ambassador of French artists to the Soviet Union, however, as a pacifist, he was uncomfortable with Stalins brutal repression of the opposition. During Serges imprisonment, Rolland had agreed to handle the publications of Serges writings in France, in 1937, he came back to live in Vézelay, which, in 1940, was occupied by the Germans. During the occupation, he isolated himself in complete solitude, never stopping his work, in 1940, he finished his memoirs
25.
Karl Adolph Gjellerup
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Karl Adolph Gjellerup was a Danish poet and novelist who together with his compatriot Henrik Pontoppidan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1917. He belonged to the Modern Break-Through and he occasionally used the pseudonym Epigonos. Gjellerup was the son of a vicar in Zealand who died when his son was three years, Karl Gjellerup was raised then by the uncle of Johannes Fibiger, he grew up in a national and romantic idealistic atmosphere. In the 1870s he broke with his background and at first he became a supporter of the naturalist movement and Georg Brandes, writing audacious novels about free love. Strongly influenced by his origin he left the Brandes line and 1885 he broke totally with the naturalists. As years passed he totally identified with the German Empire, including its war aims 1914-18, some Wagnerian dramas show his growing romanticist interests. An important work is the novel Møllen, a melodrama of love. In his last years he was influenced by Buddhism and Oriental culture. His critically acclaimed work Der Pilger Kamanita/Pilgrimen Kamanita has been called one of the oddest novels written in Danish, in Thailand, which is a Buddhist country, the Thai translation of The Pilgrim Kamanita co-translated by Phraya Anuman Rajadhon was formerly used as part of the school textbooks. Den fuldendtes hustru is a drama, inspired by Dantes Divine Comedy, about Buddhas earthly life as Siddharta, being inhibited in his spiritual efforts by his wife. Rudolph Stens Landpraksis is set in the rural Zealand of Gjellerups youth, das heiligste Tier was Gjellerups last work. Having elements of self-parody, it is regarded as his attempt at humour. It is a peculiar mythological satire in which animals arrive at their own Elysium after death and these include the snake that killed Cleopatra, Odysseus dog Argos, Wisvamitra, the donkey of Jesus and the horses of various historical commanders in field. The assembly select, after discussion, Buddhas horse Kantaka as the holiest of animals, in Denmark, Gjellerups Nobel award was received with little enthusiasm. He had long regarded as a German writer. During various stages of his career, he had made himself unpopular with both the naturalist left surrounding Georg Brandes and the conservative right and his nomination for the Nobel award was, however, supported from Danish side for several times. Because Sweden was neutral during World War I, the prize did not arouse political speculations about partial decision. Today Gjellerup is almost forgotten in Denmark, in spite of this, however, literary historians normally regard him as an honest seeker after truth
26.
Henrik Pontoppidan
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Henrik Pontoppidan was a Danish realist writer who shared with Karl Gjellerup the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1917 for his authentic descriptions of present-day life in Denmark. As a writer he was a figure, distancing himself both from the conservative environment in which he was brought up and from his socialist contemporaries. He was the youngest and in ways the most original and influential member of the Modern Break-Through. The first phase of his work constitutes rebellious social criticism, and he was perhaps the first Danish progressive writer to break with an idealised portrayal of farmers. The tales from this era are collected in Landsbybilleder and Fra Hytterne, after this period he increasingly concentrated on psychological and naturalist problems without giving up his social engagement. Pontoppidans 1889 review Messias and 1890 piece Den gamle Adam were anonymously published and triggered a controversy after being denounced as blasphemous, the editor, Ernst Brandes, was fined 300 kroner for Messias in December 1891 and committed suicide in 1892. The three novels which are considered to be Pontoppidan’s main works were written from about 1890 to 1920. In these works he established on his own terms a Danish version of the description of society novel in the tradition of Balzac. Det forjættede Land, describes a fantasist and his dream of being a preacher in the country leads to self-deception. However, at the height of his success, they at last catch up with him, pontoppidans last large novel Mands Himmerig is an almost desperate description of the crisis of a Danish intellectual at the time of the outbreak of World War I. Pontoppidan also wrote short novels and long tales in which he discussed political, psychological and sexual themes. Isbjørnen describes the confrontation between an outspoken vicar from Greenland and his narrow-minded Danish provincial clergymen, mimoser is an ironic-tragic tale about the exaggerated intolerance of unfaithfulness. Nattevagt deals with a courageous and revolutionary artist who is nevertheless a frustrated failure as a husband, Pontoppidan drew on the life of his friend the painter L. A. Ring for the portrait of the artist Thorkild Drehling, Ring considered it a betrayal of trust, Den gamle Adam deals with both men’s fear of women and of sexuality as a whole. Ørneflugt is a commentary on Hans Christian Andersens The Ugly Duckling with the opposite morale. Borgmester Hoeck og Hustru portrays a tragic marriage dominated by the husbands jealousy, a central theme in most of these tales is the difficulties of handling the new tolerance, open-mindedness and democratisation which are introduced by both the transition of society and by literature. Another theme is the conflict between the introverted and closed male nature and the vitality of the woman, behind all this lies the classic naturalist theme of heritage and milieu against which man has to rebel without quite denying their existence. In his later works he sometimes seems to become a mixture of a castigator of society, between 1933 and 1943 Pontoppidan wrote two different versions of his Memoirs, in which he tried to define his own view of his personal development
27.
Carl Spitteler
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Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler was a Swiss poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1919 in special appreciation of his epic, Olympian Spring. His work includes both pessimistic and heroic poems and his father was an official of the government, being Federal Secretary of the Treasury from 1849–56. Young Spitteler attended the gymnasium at Basel, having among his teachers philologist Wilhelm Wackernagel, from 1863 he studied law at the University of Zurich. In 1865–1870 he studied theology in the institution, at Heidelberg and Basel, though when a position as pastor was offered him. He had begun to realize his mission as an epic poet, later he worked in Russia as tutor, starting from August 1871, remaining there until 1879. Later he was teacher in Bern and La Neuveville, as well as journalist for the Der Kunstwart. In 1883 Spitteler married Marie op der Hoff, previously his pupil in Neuveville and this 1881 edition was given an extended psychological exegesis by Carl Gustav Jung in his book Psychological Types. Late in life, Spitteler reworked Prometheus and Epimetheus and published it under his true name, in 1882 he published his Extramundana, a collection of poems. He gave up teaching in 1885 and devoted himself to a career in Basel. Now his works began to come in rapid succession, in 1891 there appeared Friedli, der Kalderi, a collection of short stories, in which Spitteler, as he himself says, depicted Russian realism. Literarische Gleichnisse appeared in 1892, and Balladen in 1896, in 1900–1905 Spitteler wrote the powerful allegoric-epic poem, in iambic hexameters, Olympischer Frühling. This work, mixing fantastic, naturalistic, religions and mythological themes, during World War I he opposed the pro-German attitude of the Swiss German-speaking majority, a position put forward in the essay Unser Schweizer Standpunkt. In 1919 he won the Nobel Prize, Spitteler died at Lucerne in 1924. Carl Spittelers estate is archived in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern, in the Zürich Central Library, Carl Jung claimed his idea of the archetype of the Anima was based upon what Spitteler described as My Lady Soul. Musician David Bowie, who described himself as Jungian wrote a song in 1973 entitled Lady Grinning Soul. dichtermuseum. ch/willkommen
28.
Knut Hamsun
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Knut Hamsun was a major Norwegian writer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. Hamsuns work spans more than 70 years and shows variation with regard to the subject, perspective and he published more than 20 novels, a collection of poetry, some short stories and plays, a travelogue, and some essays. The young Hamsun objected to realism and naturalism and he argued that the main object of modernist literature should be the intricacies of the human mind, that writers should describe the whisper of blood, and the pleading of bone marrow. Hamsun is considered the leader of the Neo-Romantic revolt at the turn of the 20th century, with such as Hunger, Mysteries, Pan. His later works—in particular his Nordland novels—were influenced by the Norwegian new realism, portraying life in rural Norway and often employing local dialect, irony. Hamsun is considered to be one of the most influential and innovative literary stylists of the past hundred years, isaac Bashevis Singer called Hamsun the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect—his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, his lyricism. The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun, on August 4,2009, the Knut Hamsun Centre was opened in Hamarøy. Since 1916, several of Hamsuns works have been adapted into motion pictures, Knut Hamsun was born as Knud Pedersen in Lom in the Gudbrandsdal valley of Norway. He was the son of Tora Olsdatter and Peder Pedersen. When he was three, the moved to Hamsund, Hamarøy in Nordland. They were poor and an uncle had invited them to farm his land for him, at nine Knut was separated from his family and lived with his uncle Hans Olsen, who needed help with the post office he ran. Olsen used to beat and starve his nephew, and Hamsun later stated that his chronic nervous difficulties were due to the way his uncle treated him. In 1874 he finally escaped back to Lom, for the five years he did any job for money, he was a store clerk, peddler, shoemakers apprentice, sheriffs assistant. At 17 he became an apprentice, at about the same time he started to write. He asked businessman Erasmus Zahl to give him significant monetary support, Hamsun later used Zahl as a model for the character Mack appearing in his novels Pan, Dreamers, and Benoni and Rosa. He spent several years in America, traveling and working at various jobs, working all those odd jobs paid off, and he published his first book about it, Den Gaadefulde, En Kjærlighedshistorie fra Nordland. In his second novel Bjørger, he attempted to imitate Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsons writing style of the Icelandic saga narrative, the melodramatic story follows a poet Bjørger and his love for Laura. This book was published under the pseudonym Knud Pedersen Hamsund and this book later served as the basis for Victoria, En Kærligheds Historie
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Anatole France
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Anatole France was a French poet, journalist, and novelist. He was a successful novelist, with several best-sellers, ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters. Anatole France was also documented to have a brain size just three-quarters the normal weight, France is also widely believed to be the model for narrator Marcels literary idol Bergotte in Marcel Prousts In Search of Lost Time. The son of a bookseller, France spent most of his life around books and was a bibliophile and his fathers bookstore, called the Librairie France, specialized in books and papers on the French Revolution and was frequented by many notable writers and scholars of the day. France studied at the Collège Stanislas, a private Catholic school, after several years he secured the position of cataloguer at Bacheline-Deflorenne and at Lemerre. In 1876 he was appointed librarian for the French Senate, Anatole France began his literary career as a poet and a journalist. In 1869, Le Parnasse Contemporain published one of his poems, in 1875, he sat on the committee which was in charge of the third Parnasse Contemporain compilation. As a journalist, from 1867, he wrote articles and notices. He became famous with the novel Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard and its protagonist, skeptical old scholar Sylvester Bonnard, embodied Frances own personality. The novel was praised for its elegant prose and won him a prize from the Académie française, in La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque Anatole France ridiculed belief in the occult, and in Les Opinions de Jérôme Coignard, France captured the atmosphere of the fin de siècle. France was elected to the Académie française in 1896, France took an important part in the Dreyfus affair. He signed Émile Zolas manifesto supporting Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer who had been convicted of espionage. France wrote about the affair in his 1901 novel Monsieur Bergeret and it is a satirical history of France, starting in Medieval times, going on to the writers own time with special attention to the Dreyfus Affair and concluding with a dystopian future. Les dieux ont soif is a novel, set in Paris during the French Revolution, about a true-believing follower of Robespierre and it is a wake-up call against political and ideological fanaticism and explores various other philosophical approaches to the events of the time. La Revolte des Anges is often considered Frances most profound novel, loosley based on the Christian myth of the War in Heaven, it tells the story of Arcade, the guardian angel of Maurice dEsparvieu. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921 and he died in 1924 and is buried in the Neuilly-sur-Seine community cemetery near Paris. On 31 May 1922, Frances entire works were put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum of the Roman Catholic Church and he regarded this as a distinction. This Index was abolished in 1966, in 1877, Anatole France married Valérie Guérin de Sauville, a granddaughter of Jean-Urbain Guérin a miniaturist who painted Louis XVI, with whom he had a daughter, Suzanne, in 1881
30.
Jacinto Benavente
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Jacinto Benavente y Martínez was one of the foremost Spanish dramatists of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1922 for the manner in which he has continued the illustrious traditions of the Spanish drama. Benavente showed a preoccupation with aesthetics and later with ethics, in 1936 Benaventes name became associated with the assassination of the Spanish poet and dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca. This happened when the Nationalist newspapers Estampa, El Correo de Andalucia, Benavente died in Aldeaencabo de Escalona at the age of 87. According to many sources, he was homosexual, among his most important works are, El nido ajeno, comedy, three acts. Gente conocida, satirical scenes of life, four acts. La noche del sábado, stage romance, five divisions, Imperia is a ballerina and later prostitute who falls in love with Prince Miguel, rosas de otoño, sentimental comedy, three acts. Los intereses creados, comedy of masks based on the Italian commedia dellarte, Benaventes most famous, señora ama, rural drama, a penetrating psychological study of a woman jealous of her husband. The Unloved Woman, 1913), rural drama, three acts, the basis for the 1921 film The Passion Flower, starring Norma Talmadge. La ciudad alegre y confiada, continuation from Los intereses creados, archived from the original on 4 July 2013
31.
W. B. Yeats
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William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others. He was born in Sandymount, Ireland and educated there and in London and he spent childhood holidays in County Sligo and studied poetry from an early age when he became fascinated by Irish legends and the occult. These topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the 20th century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and its slow-paced and lyrical poems display Yeatss debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, from 1900, his poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, in 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Of Anglo-Irish descent, William Butler Yeats was born at Sandymount in County Dublin and his father, John Butler Yeats, was a descendant of Jervis Yeats, a Williamite soldier, linen merchant, and well-known painter who died in 1712. Benjamin Yeats, Jerviss grandson and Williams great-great-grandfather, had in 1773 married Mary Butler of a family in County Kildare. Following their marriage, they kept the name Butler in the family name, Mary was a descendant of the Butler of Ormond family from the Neigham Gowran branch of the family. They were descendants of the first Earls of Ormond, by his marriage, Williams father John Yeats was studying law but abandoned his studies to study art at Heatherleys Art School in London. His mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen, came from a merchant family in Sligo. Yeats was raised a member of the Protestant Ascendancy, which was at the time undergoing a crisis of identity. In 1997, his biographer R. F. Foster observed that Napoleons dictum that to understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty is manifestly true of W. B. Y. Yeatss childhood and young adulthood were shadowed by the power-shift away from the minority Protestant Ascendancy, the 1880s saw the rise of Charles Stewart Parnell and the home rule movement, the 1890s saw the momentum of nationalism, while the Catholics became prominent around the turn of the century. These developments had an effect on his poetry, and his subsequent explorations of Irish identity had a significant influence on the creation of his countrys biography. In 1867, the moved to England to aid their father, John. At first the Yeats children were educated at home and their mother entertained them with stories and Irish folktales. John provided an education in geography and chemistry, and took William on natural history explorations of the nearby Slough countryside
Jacob Wittmer Hartmann (1920). "Heidenstam, Verner von". In Rines, George Edwin. Encyclopedia Americana.
