Few writers like Ramón del Valle-Inclán (1866–1936) have been able to make will of style and aesthetic viewpoint, projected onto the world or onto human reality, fundamental tools for understanding the scales on which we view the course of history. Dealing with important events and daily occurrences, the Spanish narrator and playwright worked conscientiously, with indubitable determination and with great confidence in the illuminating power of his artistic language, which was permanently pushed to the limits of expressivity and plasticity. He carried out this project of his in short stories, novels, melodramas, farces and other literary genres, especially dealing with modern Spanish history; but this also involved dealing with the European crisis surrounding the First World War and the vestiges of Latin American and African colonization, and the lengthy processes of revolution and war that were putting an end to this domination.

This paper points out the error of evaluating Ramón del Valle‑Inclán (1866–1936) solely in a limited context, as a representative of Hispanic modernism, or as a prodigal son of the generation of ’98. The creator of the esperpentos is in fact one of the major actors in the renovation of the forms of literature: his theatre ranks beside that of Jarry, Brecht, Beckett or Meyerhold, while at the same time there are equivalences between his narrative and the writings of Mann, Proust, Faulkner, Dos Passos, or Jules Romains. Valle‑Inclán was the Spanish writer who most directly contributed to the international modernism of the first third of the 20th century.

The distinguished literary career of Ramón del Valle‑Inclán (Spain, 1866–1936), which began with the Modernist phase, eventually turned dark as the author beheld the upheavals at the turn‑of‑the‑century and its aftermath throughout Europe. Spain had lost most of its colonial empire, the Great War of 1914–18 erupted, and the Czarist regime in Russia was overthrown in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Valle‑Inclán saw the necessity of reflecting the absurdity, cruelty and savagery then rampant in Europe by creating a new theatrical aesthetic. That mode of expression he termed Esperpento. And, indeed, the Esperpento held a mirror to the social, political, and religious aberrations that defined European society, and Spain in particular, during those turbulent times.

Taking as reference framework the renewal of artistic expression in the first third of the twentieth century, based on a fruitful dialogue between the arts, this paper aims to address the art‑literature symbiosis that defines Valle‑Inclán’s work. Such a symbiosis is based on the brotherhood of the arts which in the Galician writer’s case is guaranteed, on the one hand, by his biography linking him to the art world, thanks to specific posts in institutions and organizations related to different artistic and personal relationships with contemporary artists. On the other, it is guaranteed by his role as art critic in the contemporary press. These factors explain the incidence which art in general, and, more specifically, painting, had on his work and his conception of aesthetics, as expressed in La Lámpara Maravillosa (1916).

In 1926, five years after his second visit to Mexico, Ramón María del Valle‑Inclán published Tirano Banderas, one of the most important Spanish‑language novels of the twentieth century. This article analyses the way in which Valle‑Inclán absorbed the dictates of the Mexican post‑revolutionary muralist school, integrated by figures like José Vasconcelos and Diego Rivera. It is the thesis of this article that Valle‑Inclán conferred a pro‑traditionalist twist in his adoption of some of the ruling ideologemes of this school, which sharply depart from Vasconcelos’s mestizo theories. Familiar with the Latin American identity battleground established by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in Facundo “civilization versus barbarism,” Valle‑Inclán rewrote the identifications set by the Argentinian, following instead a pro‑Hispanic and traditionalist set of references based on the selective adoption of master‑narratives of nineteenth‑century Spanish historiography “both liberal and traditionalist.” The result of this rewriting creates a social paradigm in the novel that mimics the identity visions of traditional historiography “with a clear separation of Jews, Moors and Christians” which is applied to present Mexico. The racial visions brought with this shift drain or neutralize the mestizo ideologemes, favoring a traditionalist stance loosely identifiable with pre‑Columbian forms of governance on both sides of the Atlantic.

Having recently stated in a previous article the fact that Ramón del Valle‑Inclán, Galician author nowadays considered as one of the paradigmatic writers of modern Hispanic literature, could hardly ignore the modern currents of thought originated in Paris by the end of the 19th century, the aim of this work is, therefore, to examine how the scarcely explored path of Bergsonian philosophy would contribute to an explanation of the liaisons of music, art, mysticism and poetry in the writer’s production, namely his lyrical collection of poems, Aromas de Leyenda, published in 1907.

The thematic issue on Danish and Norwegian welfare literature consists of five articles. Johs. Nørregaard Frandsen’s article, “The Insoluble Conflict of transformation: The Modern Aspect of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Galoshes of Fortune’,” discusses the modern themes in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, published 1838. Hans Christian Andersen based his short stories, tales and fairy tales on certain experiences from his own life that can shed light on aspects of modern life under the welfare state.

In this article, I analyse the tale “The Galoshes of Fortune”, published by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen in 1838. The story was thus written more than a century before the emergence of the Danish welfare state, or the so‑called welfare model, so there is hardly any point in drawing historical or societal parallels between Andersen’s age and our own in the Scandinavian countries, where the welfare state is solidly anchored as a concept and as a social model. Hans Christian Andersen, though, based his short stories, tales and fairy tales on certain experiences from his own life, and these can perhaps even so shed light on aspects of modern life under the welfare state. Hans Christian Andersen was a so‑called mould‑breaker. He was born and grew up in poverty and abject circumstances, but via his art was able to rise into the highest social spheres. This rise, or mould‑breaking, is present in many of his tales in the form of an enormous productivity, fantasy and restlessness that could never be satisfied. In that sense, Andersen is a highly modern writer, just as his themes point towards a modern society where social change is a societal necessity.

Welfare is a well‑established concept in a Danish political and literary context, and it has given rise to strong differences of opinion between literature, culture and state. The article presents the Nordic welfare model, introduces the discussions on the function of literature from the 1950s to the present day and the literary welfare themes.

Contradicting the belief that Danish modernist literature is solely of a secular nature, this article aims to show how religious ways of understanding have been of crucial importance for the literary idiom and the theme of welfare. A short description is given of the dialogic and religious theme of welfare in Danish post‑war modernism, as it was expressed by the authors around the magazine Heretica. For these authors truth lies in intersubjectivity. The meeting between people engaged in dialogue is where the collective creation of meaning takes place. These authors were qualifying the early welfare state in a particular way with the assertion that a relationship to one’s surroundings, based on dialogue and a religious mode of interpreting existence, is more conducive to a welfare‑thinking than the idea of the sovereignty of the individual. As a basis for this, the article calls attention to an evident, but rather ignored condition of the modern conception of welfare. The Danish philosopher Harald Høffding was the first in the world to work out a welfare‑principle. He expressed a dialogic and democratic standpoint, a fellowship and an ideal concerning equality, and consequently a distinct philosophical basis for the later realization of the formation of the welfare state. Høffding pointed out that welfare‑thinking has a decisive precondition in the commandment concerning charity in the Gospels and the historical development of this in Christianity.

This article examines the survival of a Romantic role of the author in post‑war Norwegian literature. It shows how an important group of writers in the late 1940s and the 1950s still shared a vision of the writer as an isolated individual, opposed to society and the state. During this time, this old role was reactivated and given a new function in opposition to the developing Welfare State. The writer and intellectual Jens Bjørneboe (1920–76) was a prominent member of this loosely organized group, and someone who makes for a particularly interesting case when exploring authorship in the Norwegian Welfare State. He started out in a right‑wing opposition to social democracy, but in the 1960s and 1970s took up a left‑wing oppositional role. His view of the writer’s relationship to society, as well as of the relationship between culture and politics, remained relatively stable, however. The article explores how such a Romantic role survived in modern Norway, and how the Welfare State project may be said both to have contributed to its long survival, and, in the end, through a generally democratizing movement, to have made it impossible.

This close reading analysis shows collage technique is used for critical, theoretical and creative purposes in a typical “revolutionary novel” of the 1968 movement. As a genre hybrid, Sven Holm’s Minelskede—enskabelonroman (My Beloved—A Pattern Novel, 1968) illustrates the urban society’s estrangement from the organic community, the arbitrary construction of meaning by the difference of signs and the ongoing process of collage. These three issues are critical with respect to the urban society, the interaction between human language and everyday life, and even fleeting art forms (happening, concept art). In fact, collage technique as writing and composition process turns out to be much more important than the results of collage and montage themselves. At the same time, different problems of social communities are discussed in the text because of their ambivalent demands on group solidarity and respect for individual interests. It is evident that Holm’s novel is a unique “city collage text fragment” using the latest art and architecture expressions of the sixties but also with a retrograde romantic notion on politics.

Old age is a major issue in many political debates in the contemporary Danish welfare state as well as in much contemporary Danish fiction. Most western populations are experiencing a demographic revolution, where societies are coming to consist of an increasing number of older compared to younger citizens. This puts pressure on the traditional Danish or Scandinavian welfare model, which has financed all older citizens’ pensions and healthcare, but which most politicians and economists argue cannot be carried into the future in an unchanged form. Thus welfare reforms have been accelerating since the 1990s. Concurrently, in contemporary realist fiction many authors address the subject of old age, aging and the welfare institutions and intersubjective collectives in which this takes place. In these fictions, often set in nursing homes, hence “nursing home novels,” we may observe how individual citizens can be imagined to live in and with these welfare reforms. Among these authors this essay singles out Bent Vinn Nielsen and in particular his novel from 2010, Et liv i almindelighed (A Life in Ordinariness), to propose that through the immersive experience of fictional reading such a text potentially provides readers with affective knowledge of the final chapters of life as experienced by ordinary individuals in the welfare state. This knowledge is needed, the essay proposes, in order to have a qualified and properly nuanced public debate about old age in the welfare state of the future.

Chinese fiction in the 21st century is featured by various thematic concerns of which the political concern stands out. Writers in the new century have diverged from the conventional way to sing along with and speak for the dominant ideology of the reform as many did during Deng Xiaoping’s reign. They have shifted their attention to the shaded side of contemporary China, writing about the disadvantaged/marginalized and reflecting on the social problems that accompany the existing social order. Their voice is harsh, interrogative, but heart‑wrenching. The paper will cite the newly released texts by Yan Lianke, Mo Yan and Liu Xinglong to examine how these writers interrogate the leading policies and write up the grassroots rebellion against the orthodox society.

Ezra Pound’s poem “Liu Ch’e” is a translation of a Chinese poem, “Song of Fallen Leaves and Whining Cicadas.” Pound’s “Liu Ch’e” has become a new poem that has incorporated his poetic theory: it is an independent, self‑poem, without reference to the contained original poem, “Song of Fallen Leaves and Whining Cicadas.” The paper investigates the original poem and the translation by looking at Chinese scholars’ critiques and Giles’ and Pound’s translations of the same poem.

How has the translation of Chinese poetry into English contributed to the reconsideration of the self—or “the lyric ego”—in contemporary and avant‑garde Anglophone poetry? Examining the micro‑history of avant‑garde English presentations of Chinese poetry, and the shifting configuration of China in the politico‑economic sphere and the Anglophone imaginary over the last hundred years, this paper will offer a socio‑linguistic reflection on the notion of the self. Specifically, I will approach the divergence between so‑called “avant‑garde” and “Unmarked Case” (my term for “establishment” or “mainstream”) poetic communities by interrogating whether such a distinction is sociological or linguistic. Through the lens of Chinese poetry translation, I will trace the development of “Classical” Chinese poetry in English translation from its former association with English experimentation (Pound, Rexroth, Snyder, etc.) to being upheld by stalwarts of “Official Verse Culture” (Milosz, Merwin, Wright, Young, etc.), leaving avant‑gardists (Hejinian, Padgett, Waldrop, etc.) to entertain their current predilection for the contemporary in Chinese poetry. This examination will yield conclusions both about our definitions of “modernity” and “tradition” as well as about how we deploy language and rhetoric to signify those concepts. Finally, looking at the few current poetic avant‑gardists—John Cayley, Kit Kelen, Jonathan Stalling, and Jeffrey Yang—who work both with modern and pre‑modern Chinese poetry, I will conclude with an appeal for a view of translation that can work to reconcile the socio‑linguistic divisions between the avant‑garde and the “unmarked.”