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unnamed woman who tells the story of Robinson
Crusoe to author Daniel Defoe. This woman, like
the colonized people of South Africa, loses her
voice in the great machine of colonial history and
is unrecognized and forgotten.
Russian author Fyodor DOSTOYEVSKY is the hero
of The Master of Petersburg, a fictional account of
Dostoyevsky tracing the steps of his recently dead
stepson, Pavel, around the city of St. Petersburg.
The novel is Coetzee’s most postmodern work in
that it explores the act of writing and the power of
language. The character of Dostoyevsky does not
use writing’s power to help the Russian revolution-
aries, however, but to understand and come closer
to his dead stepson.
Coetzee’s novel Disgrace is similar to The Life
and Times of Michael K, in that its main character,
David Lurie, like Michael K., suffers greatly
to achieve a small amount of clarity and redemp-
tion. David Lurie loses his job as a professor,
becomes a caretaker for dying animals, is refused
by prostitutes, and considers castrating himself.
Disgrace is Coetzee’s first book to deal with
postapartheid South Africa directly. Political
change does little to improve the lives of the indi-
viduals in the novel. Andrew O’Hehir writes that in
Coetzee’s novels “political and historical forces
blow through the lives of individuals like nasty
weather systems” (www.salon.com). Again and
again, Coetzee presents characters who are tossed
about violently but who, in every novel, pick up
and move on.
The major influences on his work are Franz
KAFKA and Samuel BECKETT. Like Kafka and Beck-
ett’s characters, the people in Coetzee’s books have
a troubled existence in which suffering seems to
be the defining characteristic of life.
Coetzee’s books have been translated into more
than 20 languages. Coetzee has held visiting pro-
fessorships across the United States, including
Harvard, the University of Chicago, and Johns
Hopkins University. Besides fiction, he has written
many books of essays, including White Writing: On
the Culture of Letters in South Africa (1988) and
The Lives of Animals (1999).
J. M. Coetzee’s work eloquently deals with
South Africa’s political history; the nature of writ-
ing, language, and power; and how human rela-
tionships are divided by the gap between the
powered and the powerless. Coetzee won the
Nobel Prize in 2003.
Other Works by J. M. Coetzee
Giving Offence: Essays on Censorship. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1996.
A Land Apart: A Contemporary South African Reader.
New York: Viking, 1987.
Works about J. M. Coetzee
Atwell, David. J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Pol-
itics of Writing. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993.
O’Hehir, Andrew. “‘Disgrace’ by J. M. Coetzee.” Salon
Books 5, November 1999. www.salon.com/books/
review/1999/11/05/coetzee
Viola, Andre.“An Interview with J. M. Coetzee.” Com-
monwealth Essays and Studies 14, no. 2 (Spring
1992): 6–7.
Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette)
(1873–1954) novelist
Considered one of the leading French novelists of
the 20th century, Colette was born in the village of
Saint-Saveur-en-Puisaye, Burgundy. She was the
daughter of a retired army captain, Jules-Joseph Co-
lette, who had lost a leg in the Italian campaign, and
the highly unconventional Adèle Eugénie Sidonie
Landoy, known as “Sidonie” or “Sido.” Her mother’s
down-to-earth personality, devotion to animals,
reading, and gardening greatly influenced Colette.
Colette’s career as a novelist began when she
was in her early 20s and continued into her mid-
70s, during which time she wrote more than 50
books, numerous short stories, and articles for
major newspapers and magazines. Always in some
way autobiographical in nature, her works blur the
boundaries between reality and fiction in an at-
tempt to explore love and female sexuality in a
masculine world.
98 Colette
Colette was first encouraged to write by her first
husband, writer and music critic Henri Gauthier-
Villars. According to some sources, he locked her
in her room and would not let her leave until she
had completed a requisite number of pages. Re-
gardless of how she started, however, Colette pub-
lished four of what came to be known as her
Claudine novels in rapid succession between 1900
and 1903, using her husband’s pen name Willy. The
novels, all recounting the often prurient adventures
of a teenage girl, became so successful that they in-
spired other products, including a musical adapta-
tion, costumes, soap, cigars, and perfume.
Becoming disillusioned by her husband’s re-
peated adultery, Colette separated from him in
1905 and was divorced in 1906. She went to work
as a music-hall performer, doing such memorable
things as baring her breasts and simulating sex on
stage, an act that resulted in a riot at the Moulin
Rouge.
During this period, Colette found a protector, a
woman known as “Missy,” the niece of Napoleon
III, and who was instrumental in establishing Co-
lette’s image as a writer, an actress, and a lesbian.
“Missy” committed suicide in 1944. Colette was
later known, at various points in her life, to have
become friends and, most likely, lovers with noted
American lesbian Natalie Clifford Barney and Ital-
ian author Gabriele
D’ANNUNZIO. Such an inde-
pendent and gregarious lifestyle eventually filtered
into Colette’s writing. She remained devoted to her
independence, however, and published La Vaga-
bonde (1910), a story about an actress who decides
to reject the man she loves to protect her ability to
live her life as she pleases.
In 1912, Colette married newspaper editor
Henri de Jouvenel des Ursins. She wrote theater ar-
ticles and short stories for his paper and bore him
one child, Colette de Jouvenel. Colette had not
wanted children and, consequently, neglected her
daughter. She also began a questionable relation-
ship with her stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel, which
resulted in much gossip. She depicts this affair in
her novel Chéri (1920), as told from the point of
view of a sexually naive young man.
Critical Analysis
Colette’s works are generally divided into four
phases. Her early works are the Claudine novels,
followed by a time when she wrote predominantly
about life in the theater, followed by works about
the politics of love, and ultimately followed by her
more mature works depicting reminiscences of
youth and family. Her fame began to expand in the
1920s, and by 1927 she was often referred to as
France’s leading female writer. Her mature works,
written during this time, depict a peaceful world
and the delicate nature of the mother–daughter
bond. La Maison de Claudine (My Mother’s House,
1922), La Naissance du jour (A Lesson in Love,
1928) and Sido (1929) all celebrate her carefree
rural childhood and her mother’s strength and vi-
tality. This period marks a distinction from the
darker world depicted in her earlier works. Her use
of the character/narrator “Colette” in works such
as L’Étoile vesper (1946) and Le Fanal bleu (1949)
further blurred her distinctions between fiction
and reality.
Colette received many awards throughout her
lifetime. She was the first woman to be granted ad-
mission to the prestigious Goncourt Academy, and
in 1953, she was elected a grand officer of the Le-
gion of Honour. A crippling form of arthritis
haunted the last 20 years of her life; however, she
still managed to publish Gigi (1945) at the age of
72. The novel was later made into a film in 1948
and into a musical in 1958, directed by Vincente
Minnelli.
Colette died on August 3 in Paris. Because of
her popularity, she was granted a state funeral that
was attended by thousands of her admirers but was
denied Catholic rites because she had been di-
vorced.
Another Work by Colette
Break of Day. New York: Ballantine Books, 1983.
A Work about Colette
Thurman, Judith. Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette.
New York: Knopf, 1999.
Colette 99
Collymore, Frank (Colly) (1893–1980)
poet, short-story writer, teacher, lexicographer,
editor
Frank Collymore was born in St. Michael, Barba-
dos, to Joseph Appleton Collymore, a government
customs officer, and Rebecca Wilhelmina, née
Clark. Collymore attended Combermere School, a
grammar school for boys, from 1903 to 1910 and
taught at the same school from 1910 until 1963.
George
LAMMING, the West Indian novelist, poet,
and critic, was one of his many students.
Collymore did not publish his first book of po-
etry, Thirty Poems, until 1944. Poems in this and
other collections both humorously and seriously
examine a variety of topics—landscape, love, war,
conformity, and history. After the productive po-
etry years of the 1940s when he published three
books containing 103 poems, Collymore shifted
his attention to writing short stories. Eighteen of
his short stories appeared in Bim, a magazine
started by the Young Men’s Progressive Club of
Barbados. Many of these stories have a dark, even
morbid edge, and the mind appears as a recurring
theme. In his story Shadows, published in Bim in
December 1942, for example, the narrator asks:
“The mind. What do you and I know of the
mind, and of the vast forces which lie around us,
in us and yet not wholly of us, secret, prowling,
mysterious, fraught with such power as is be-
yond our knowledge, watching and waiting to
encompass us, to overthrow what we call the
seat of the reason—the mind whose powers and
weaknesses we can never hope to comprehend?”
Working with the editing and publishing of
Bim from 1942 to 1975 enabled Collymore to in-
fluence the production and consumption of West
Indian literature significantly, as explained by
Lamming in a special introduction to the June
1955 issue:
“There are not many West Indian writers today
who did not use Bim as a kind of platform, the
surest, if not the only avenue, by which they
might reach a literate and sensitive reading
public, and almost all of the West Indians who
are now writers in a more professional sense
and whose work has compelled the attention of
readers and writers in other countries, were in-
troduced, so to speak, by Bim.”
Collymore also used other avenues to introduce
readers to West Indian writers; he introduced a 19-
year-old Derek
WALC OT T as a true poet in Savacou
(1949). In a 1986 essay in Fifty Caribbean Writers,
Edward Baugh asserts, “Collymore earned his rep-
utation as a doyen and godfather of West Indian
Literature.” In a 1971 essay in West Indian Poetry
1900–1970, Baugh goes on to say that Collymore’s
poetry marked “something of an advance in West
Indian poetry,” his influences having been “more
twentieth-century than those of his coevals [con-
temporaries].”
Other Works by Frank Collymore
The Man Who Loved Attending Funerals and Other
Stories. Edited by Harold Barratt and Reinhard
Sander. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1993.
Rhymed Ruminations of the Fauna of Barbados.
Bridgetown, Barbados: Advocate, 1968.
Selected Poems. Bridgetown, Barbados: Coles Print-
ery, 1971.
Works about Frank Collymore
Baugh, Edward. “Frank Collymore: A Biographical
Portrait.” Savacou: A Journal of the Caribbean
Artists Movement 7–8 (1973): 139–48.
Sander, Reinhard W., Esmond D. Ramesar, and Ed-
ward Baugh. An Index to Bim 1942–1972. St. Au-
gustine, Trinidad: University of West Indies
Extra-Mural Studies Unit, 1973.
Condé, Maryse (1934– ) novelist,
playwright, essayist, critic, professor
Maryse Condé was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guade-
loupe. A bright student with a penchant for read-
ing, Condé attended school in Guadeloupe before
continuing her education in France. Studying black
100 Collymore, Frank
stereotypes in Caribbean literature, she earned a
doctorate in comparative literature in 1975 from
the Université de Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle).
Condé taught French in multiple countries, in-
cluding Guinea, Accra, and Sénégal, from 1960 to
1968. After working as a program producer for the
French Services of the BBC from 1968 to 1970, she
became an editor at the Paris publishing house
Présence Africaine and, in 1973, began to teach
Francophone literature at Paris VII (Jussieu), X
(Nanterre), and III (Sorbonne Nouvelle).
While teaching, Condé also wrote. She pub-
lished numerous novels after the release of her
first, Hérémakhonon (Welcome Home) in 1976. In
Hérémakhonon, Veronica, a young Guadeloupian
woman who was educated in Paris, goes to West
Africa to examine her history. Although multiple
similarities exist between Veronica’s and Condé’s
life experiences, Condé denies that Veronica is an
autobiographical character. Like the first novel,
Une Saison à Rihata (A Season in Rihata, 1981) fol-
lows a Guadeloupian female protagonist to a fic-
tional West African country repressed by
postcolonial regimes. Both novels use multiple
points of view to reconstruct history.
Ségou (Segu, 1984, 1985), Condé’s third novel
and written in two volumes, positioned her as a
premier contemporary Caribbean writer. Set in the
African kingdom of Segu between 1797 and 1860,
the novel follows four sons of a royal family to
Brazil and the Caribbean while addressing religion,
slavery, corruption, incest, and rape. Some criti-
cized the novel as soap-operaesque, but in The New
York Times Book Review, May 31, 1987, Charles Lar-
son called Ségou “the most significant historical
novel about black Africa published in many a year.”
It weaves relatively unknown fragments of African
history with compelling personal narratives.
Between Hérémakhonon and Ségou, Condé
published numerous theoretical essays on Antil-
lean culture and literature, but afterward she fo-
cused on creative writing. The focus of her fiction
also shifted from Africa to the African diaspora
after Ségou. Moi, Tituba, sorcière noire de Salem
(I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, 1986) uses first-
person narrative to tell the story of an obscure
historical figure, Tituba—a black slave from Bar-
bados arrested for witchcraft in the United States
during the 17th century. Subsequent works, such
as La Vie scélérate (The Tree of Life, 1987) and Les
Derniers Rois Mages (The Last Magi, 1992) con-
tinue to explore themes of exile, psychological
dislocation, race, class, gender, and history. An
indication of Condé’s widespread acclaim,
her novels have been translated into English, Ger-
man, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and
Japanese.
In 1990, Condé took a position at the University
of California, Berkeley. Since then, she has worked
at the University of Virginia, the University of
Maryland, and Harvard. Condé, at the University
of Columbia since 1995, has chaired the Center for
French and francophone studies. Her multifaceted
writing techniques and narrative strategies, as well
as her work’s political and cultural themes, make
her one of the most important Caribbean fran-
cophone writers.
Other Works by Maryse Condé
Crossing the Mangrove. Translated by Richard
Philcox. New York: Anchor Books, 1995.
Land of Many Colors & Nanna-ya. Translated by
Nicole Ball. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1999.
Tales from the Heart: True Stories from My Childhood.
Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Soho,
2001.
Works about Maryse Condé
Apter, Emily S. “Crossover Texts/Creole Tongues: A
Conversation with Maryse Condé.” Public Culture
13, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 89–96.
Arowolo, Bukoye. “The Black Caribbean Woman’s
Search for Identity in Maryse Condé’s Novels.” In
Feminism and Black Women’s Creative Writing:
Theory, Practice, and Criticism. Edited by Aduke
Adebayo. Ibadan, Nigeria: AMD, 1996.
Suk, Jeannie. Postcolonial Paradoxes in French
Caribbean Writing: Césaire, Glissant, Condé. Ox-
ford: Clarendon, 2001.
Condé, Maryse 101
Constant de Rebecque, Benjamin
(1767–1830) nonfiction writer, novelist
Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque was born
on October 25 in Lausanne, Switzerland. His
mother died from complications in childbirth one
week after Constant was born. Tutored as a young
child, he read daily for eight to 10 hours. He was
sent at a young age to the University of Erlangen in
Bavaria, where he learned German, one of three
languages in which he was proficient by the time
he was 18. He later transferred to the University of
Edinburgh where he studied under distinguished
proponents of freedom, including Adam Smith,
Adam Ferguson, and Dugald Stewart. He subse-
quently moved to Paris to study with the intellec-
tual Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard. While there, he
became close friends with the great Lafayette,
among other influential thinkers.
In 1794, he met Germaine de STAËL, whose in-
fluence piqued his interest in politics. He began to
publish political pamphlets and was appointed a
member of the Tribunal under Napoleon. But
Constant was critical of Napoleon’s policies, espe-
cially his project to make himself consul for life
(and later emperor), and when in 1802 Napoleon
banished de Staël, Constant accompanied her in
her exile from France.
Constant’s works of political theory include De
l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation (On the Spirit
of Conquest and Usurpation, 1814) and Principes de
politique (Political Principles, 1816). One of his
principles was the importance of protecting indi-
vidual liberty against both government and the en-
croachments of the majority. He also wrote a
five-volume treatise, De la religion (On Religion,
1824–31). Unlike many French thinkers of his
time, he believed that religion was a positive force
in society and a necessary balance to the power of
government.
In 1816, a short novel Constant had written 10
years previously, Adolphe, was published. With
great economy of style, the work tells the story of
a young man’s involvement with an older woman
and his painful efforts to disentangle himself from
the affair. It is presumed that the story has autobi-
ographical elements, though whether the unfortu-
nate Elleanore is based on Madame de Staël or on
one of the other women in Constant’s life has not
been established. Ironically, Constant is better re-
membered for Adolphe, a work to which he at-
tached no great value but which is seen as an
important forerunner of the psychological novel
than for his immense work on religion, which oc-
cupied decades of his life.
Constant produced dozens of works that defied
laws limiting freedom of speech and freedom of
the press. He campaigned against the African slave
trade and fought for civil liberties alongside
Lafayette. Constant’s health began to decline rap-
idly in 1830, and he died on December 8. At his
funeral service, people lined the streets to wave the
tricolor flags of the Liberal Party in his honor.
Other Works by Benjamin Constant
Adolphe. Translated by Margaret Mauldon. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2001.
Political Writings. Translated by Biancamaria
Fontana. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1988.
Works about Benjamin Constant
Holmes, Stephen. Benjamin Constant and the Making
of Modern Liberalism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1984.
Todorov, Tszvetan. A Passion for Democracy: Ben-
jamin Constant. New York: Algora, 1998.
Wood, Dennis. Benjamin Constant: A Biography. New
York: Routledge, 1993.
Cortázar, Julio (1914–1984) novelist,
short-story writer, translator
Julio Cortázar was born in Brussels, Belgium, to
Argentinean parents. He moved to Argentina with
his family after World War I when he was four
years old, having learned by then to speak French
as well as Spanish. Not long after returning to Ar-
gentina, his father abandoned his family, leaving
Cortázar to be raised by his mother. As a student,
Cortázar was interested in literature, attending the
102 Constant de Rebecque, Benjamin
Teacher’s College in Buenos Aires from which he
received a degree in literature in 1935. His earliest
jobs were as a secondary school teacher in various
towns in Argentina.
In 1945, Cortázar left teaching to become a
translator of both English and French writers for
various publishing houses in Argentina, but by
1951 he was so much against the Perón regime in
Argentina that he turned down the opportunity to
have a chair at the University of Buenos Aires and
instead went to live in France, where he remained
until his death. While in France, he also worked as
a translator for UNESCO, dividing each year so
that he would translate for six months and write
fiction and play jazz trumpet the remaining six
months. He lived part of the time in Paris and the
rest at his home in the Provençal village of Saignon
in the south of France. Cortázar was committed to
the revolutionary political movements in Latin
America, as witnessed by his visit to Cuba in 1961,
his support of the United Chilean Front, and his
visit to Nicaragua in 1983.
By his own admission, Cortázar was influenced
by SYMBOLIST and surrealist writers such as Comte
de LAUTREAMONT, Arthur RIMBAUD, Stéphane MAL-
LARMÉ, Alfred JARRY, Jean COCTEAU, and Jorge Luis
BORGES. He was also influenced by Edgar Allen Poe,
John Keats, and Virginia Woolf. Both his fiction
and interviews with him reveal his belief that re-
ality is actually a collage of the rational and the ir-
rational, the linear and the nonlinear, fantasy and
what we generally tend to consider “real,” all ex-
isting on different planes at the same time. In his
humorous and satirical book Cronopios and
Famas (1962), for example, Cortázar divides the
world between cronopios, imaginary creatures
who represent the magical in life, and famas, those
who represent conventional reality. In addition,
his novel The Winners (1960) is composed of var-
ious disparate characters who, after winning a lot-
tery, find themselves together on a holiday cruise,
their prize. This external voyage becomes a
metaphor for the internal, metaphysical con-
frontation that each character has with himself or
herself.
Of all that Cortázar has written, however, he is
best known for being the author of the short story
“Blow-Up” (which inspired Michelangelo Anto-
nioni’s famous film of the same name) and of the
novel Hopscotch, which first appeared in 1963. A
novel that works on a number of levels, Hopscotch
consists of a series of numbered chapters that can
be read “in normal fashion” or in an entirely dif-
ferent sequence, which Cortázar provides, inform-
ing the reader, “In its own way, this book consists
of many books, but two books above all.” Like a
labyrinth or the actual game of hopscotch, the
reader who follows the nonlinear “sequence”
jumps around while trying to keep his or her bal-
ance as the characters search for heaven or hell or
the center of the labyrinth. Considered to be one of
the major novels written by a Latin American in
the 20th-century, Hopscotch has been called an
“antinovel” in its methods of breaking with tradi-
tional form and content while maintaining a com-
ical sense of the absurd.
Julio Cortázar is now considered one of the
most important 20th-century Latin American
writers, known for his experimentalism and MAGIC
REALISM. His short stories and novels, written with
wit and a startling sense of fantasy, portray com-
plex characters faced with metaphysical anguish.
Other Works by Julio Cortázar
62: A Model Kit. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. New
York: New Directions, 2000.
Blow Up and Other Stories. Translated by Paul Black-
burn. New York: Pantheon, 1985.
Final Exam. Translated by Alfred J. MacAdam. New
York: New Directions, 2000.
Works about Julio Cortázar
Moran, Dominic. Questions of the Liminal in the Fic-
tion of Julio Cortázar. Oxford: European Humani-
ties Research Centre, 2001.
Standish, Peter. Understanding Julio Cortázar. Co-
lumbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press,
2001.
Stavans, Ilan. Julio Cortázar: A Study of the Short Fic-
tion. New York: Twayne, 1996.
Cortázar, Julio 103
Costumbrismo
Costumbrismo was a main feature of Spanish ro-
manticism. It was, in the most general of terms, the
practice of creating literary sketches that captured
realistic details about local life and customs. The
word costumbrismo comes from the Spanish cos-
tumbres, which means “customs.”
Although this practice was a feature in all of
Europe’s romantic traditions, such as French
ROMANTICISM
and German Romanticism, it was
so pronounced and so central to the Spanish
romantics that it deserves notice.
Romanticism in Spain in the late 18th and early
19th centuries was a reaction to the previous cen-
tury’s domination by the aesthetic ideas of the En-
lightenment. The Enlightenment proposed that
there were universal standards for beauty and har-
mony and that the arts should always follow neo-
classical models. Spanish Costumbrismo is a
reaction against this sort of subtle cultural imperi-
alism. By concentrating on the aesthetic value of
the extremely local and idiosyncratic elements of
Spanish culture, the writers of the Spanish roman-
tic movement, for example Gustavo Alfonso
BÉC-
QUER, were rebelling against the tyranny of the
ideal in favor of their own experiences.
Other romantic writers used Costumbrismo for
other purposes. For example, the author Mariano
José de Larra (1809–37) used Costumbrismo as a
mode to satirize peculiar Spanish customs and
point out the absurdity and barbarity of his con-
temporaries.
Costumbrismo used slang and local dialects to
such a degree that a literary portrait written in
Seville was unlikely to be understood by a citizen
of Barcelona.
In Enlightenment thought, the individual is al-
ways subservient to a norm that may be discov-
ered empirically. The consequence of this line of
thinking is that the individual artist is discour-
aged from expressing idiosyncratic points of view
in favor of attempting to express values and ideas
that are universally applicable to all humanity.
Costumbrismo challenges these ideas by focus-
ing on art’s relationship to the specific and im-
mediate environment in which it is made. As a re-
sult many works of Costumbrismo are not
portable to other times and are not easily trans-
lated or understood. On the other hand, Costum-
brismo has a nuance and a level of vivid, sensuous
detail that is often lacking in the didactic works of
Enlightenment literature, which are mostly philo-
sophical treatises.
Costumbrismo reintroduced the more per-
sonal dramas of everyday life into Spanish litera-
ture. In addition, the roots of the 19th-century
novel and even of
MODERNISM may be seen in Cos-
tumbrismo.
A Work about Costumbrismo
Tully, Carol Lisa. Creating a National Identity: A
Comparative Study of German and Spanish Ro-
manticism. Stuttgart, Germany: H. D. Heinz, 1997.
Coverley, Mrs. Eric
See BENNETT, LOUISE.
Crayencour, Marguerite de
See YOURCENAR, MARGUERITE.
Cronin, Jeremy (1949– ) poet and
essayist
Jeremy Cronin was born in Durban, South Africa,
and studied at the University of Cape Town and
the Sorbornne. He was arrested under the 1976
Terrorism Act for participating in underground
work for the banned African National Congress in
1976 and spent seven years in a maximum-security
prison, three of those years among inmates on
death row. While he served his sentence, his wife
unexpectedly died. He was released in 1983, the
same year that his first collection of poems, Inside,
was released.
Inside was translated into many languages and
won the 1984 Ingrid Jonker Prize. The collection
104 Costumbrismo
chronicles the relationship between the public life
of political struggle and the private life and feelings
that accompany this struggle.
Cronin spent three years in exile from South
Africa, returning in 1990. His poetry has ap-
peared in many magazines and anthologies, and
his collection Even The Dead received much crit-
ical acclaim after its publication in 1997. The col-
lection is a marked departure from his earlier
work and attempts to defy the “amnesia” that pre-
vents people from remembering South Africa’s
past. Cronin says of his eponymous poem, “Even
The Dead,” “I am not sure what poetry is. I am
not sure what the aesthetic is. Perhaps the aes-
thetic should be defined in opposition to the
anesthetic....Art is the struggle to stay awake”
(De Kock). Cronin’s pieces determinedly fight the
urge to forget the past—he uses the past to forge
the trail to the future. His most recent work, In-
side and Out (1999) a compilation of poems from
his previously published volumes, revisits these
themes.
Cronin has served as deputy general secretary
of the South African Communist Party and lives in
Johannesburg. His reinvention of poetic form and
style shows the changing landscape of South Africa
both physically and politically.
Works Edited by Jeremy Cronin
The Ideologies of Politics. With Anthony de
Crespigny. New York: Oxford University Press,
1975.
Thirty Years of the Freedom Charter. With Raymond
Suttner. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987.
Works about Jeremy Cronin
De Kock, Leon. “A Different Cronin.” Electronic
Mail and Guardian Review of Books. August
1997.
Gardner, Susan. Four South African Poets: Robert
Berold, Jeremy Cronin, Douglas Reid Skinner, and
Stephen Watson—Interviews. Grahamstown,
South Africa: National English Literary Museum,
1986.
Curnow, Allen (1911–2001) poet, dramatist,
editor
Allen Curnow was born in Timaru, New Zealand.
Although his mother was born in England, on his
father’s side he was a fifth-generation New Zealan-
der. After studying at Christchurch BHS and the
universities of Canterbury and Auckland, Curnow
made the decision not to be ordained as an Angli-
can clergyman, as his father was. Instead, he began
his career as a journalist and, between 1951 and
1976, taught English at Auckland University.
Curnow edited the first collections of New Zealand
poetry, A Book of New Zealand Verse: 1923–45
(1945, 1951) and The Penguin Book of New Zealand
Verse (1960).
A MODERNIST poet, Curnow was a friend of the
British-American poet W. H. Auden, for whom he
named his son Wystan (Auden’s first name). For a
short period of time, while overseas in 1949, he
stayed with the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, with
whom he became friends. Curnow’s early poetry
focuses on social and physical aspects of New
Zealand, its landscape, and its place in the larger
world, but by the time World War II broke out,
Curnow was more concerned with personal as well
as universal themes, as reflected in At Dead Low
Water and Sonnets (1949).
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Curnow was
considered one of New Zealand’s most important
poets. His reputation only increased with the 1972
publication of Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects, a
highly acclaimed sequence of 18 poems. The style of
his writing was becoming more open and contem-
porary as he began to focus on the wild landscape of
Lone Kauri Road and Karekare Beach on Auckland’s
west coast, where he had been spending vacations.
During his long career, Curnow was awarded
the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry six times,
the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (1988), the
Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry (1989), a Chol-
mondeley Award (1992), the A. W. Reed Lifetime
Achievement Award of the Montana New Zealand
Books Awards (2000), and the 2001 Montana New
Zealand Award for his last book of poems, The
Bells of Saint Babel’s.
Curnow, Allen 105
Works about Allen Curnow
Stead, C. K. Kin of Place: Essays on New Zealand
Writers. Auckland: Auckland University Press,
2002.
Wieland, James. Ensphering Mind: A Comparative
Study of Derek Walcott, Christopher Okigbo, A. D.
Hope, Allen Curnow, A. M. Klein and Nissim
Ezekiel. Pueblo, Colo.: Passeggiata Press, 1988.
Czaczkes, Shmuel Yosef
See AGNON, SAMUEL JOSEF.
106 Czaczkes, Shmuel Yosef
107
D
Dada (1916–1920)
Dada or dadaism, taken from the French word for
hobby-horse, was a nihilistic movement in the arts
that spread primarily throughout France, Switzer-
land, and Germany, and the United States between
1916 and 1920. It was founded on principles of an-
archy, intentional irrationality, cynicism, and the
rejection of social organization.
The origin of the name, like the movement it-
self, lacks any formal logic. The most widely ac-
cepted theory is that, at a meeting in 1916 at the
Café Voltaire in Zurich, a group of young artists
and war resisters inserted a letter opener into a
French–German dictionary. The letter opener
pointed to the word dada.
The basis of the movement was more substan-
tive than the origin of its name. It was founded as
a protest against bourgeois values and as a direct
result of mounting sentiments of despair about
World War I. One of the chief ambitions of the
movement was to discover authentic reality by
abolishing traditional culture and values. Com-
prised of painters, writers, dancers, and musicians,
the dadaists were often involved in several art
forms simultaneously and sought to break down
the boundaries that kept individual art forms dis-
tinct. The dadaists did not only want to create art;
they wanted to promote revolutionary changes.
They were not interested in public admiration but
sought to provoke the public into action. To the
dadaists, a violently negative reaction was better
than a passive acceptance.
Although as a movement dadaism concerned
all forms of the arts, including visual and perform-
ance modes, in France it was predominately liter-
ary in emphasis, taking the lead from one of its
founders, the poet Tristan
TZARA. The most noted
French publication was the journal Littérature,
which was published from 1919 to 1924 and con-
tained works by André BRETON, Louis ARAGON,
Philippe Soupault (1897–?), and Paul ÉLUARD.
The dada movement began to decline in 1922 as
many of its proponents began to develop an inter-
est in surrealism.
Works about Dada
Erickson, John D. Dada: Performance, Poetry and
Art. Boston: Twayne, 1984.
Matthews, J. H. Theatre in Dada and Surrealism. Syra-
cuse: Syracuse University Press, 1974.
Da
v
glarca, Fazil Hüsnü (1914– ) poet
Fazil Hüsnü Da
v
glarca was born in Istanbul, Turkey,
shortly after the start of World War I. He was the
fifth child of an army officer, completed his higher