title: Actinic keratosis

text: It is thought that ultraviolet (UV) radiation induces mutations in the keratinocytes of the epidermis, promoting the survival and proliferation of these atypical cells. Both UV-A and UV-B radiation have been implicated as causes of AKs. UV-A radiation (wavelength 320–400 nm) reaches more deeply into the skin and can lead to the generation of reactive oxygen species, which in turn can damage cell membranes, signaling proteins, and nucleic acids. UV-B radiation (wavelength 290–320 nm) causes thymidine dimer formation in DNA and RNA, leading to significant cellular mutations. In particular, mutations in the p53 tumor suppressor gene have been found in 30–50% of AK lesion skin samples.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: UV radiation has also been shown to cause elevated inflammatory markers such as arachidonic acid, as well as other molecules associated with inflammation. Eventually, over time these changes lead to the formation of AKs. Several predictors for increased AK risk from UV radiation have been identified:


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Melanin is a pigment in the epidermis that functions to protect keratinocytes from the damage caused by UV radiation; it is found in higher concentrations in the epidermis of darker-skinned individuals, affording them protection against the development of AKs.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Fair-skinned individuals have a significantly increased risk of developing AKs when compared to olive-skinned individuals (odds ratios of 14.1 and 6.5, respectively), and AKs are uncommon in dark-skinned people of African descent. Other phenotypic features seen in fair-skinned individuals that are associated with an increased propensity to develop AKs include:


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Physicians usually diagnose actinic keratosis by doing a thorough physical examination, through a combination of visual observation and touch. However a biopsy may be necessary when the keratosis is large in diameter, thick, or bleeding, in order to make sure that the lesion is not a skin cancer. Actinic keratosis may progress to invasive squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) but both diseases can present similarly upon physical exam and can be difficult to distinguish clinically. Histological examination of the lesion from a biopsy or excision may be necessary to definitively distinguish AK from in situ or invasive SCC. In addition to SCCs, AKs can be mistaken for other cutaneous lesions including seborrheic keratoses, basal cell carcinoma, lichenoid keratosis, porokeratosis, viral warts, erosive pustular dermatosis of the scalp, pemphigus foliaceus, inflammatory dermatoses like psoriasis, or melanoma.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: A lesion biopsy is performed if the diagnosis remains uncertain after a clinical physical exam, or if there is suspicion that the AK might have progressed to squamous cell carcinoma. The most common tissue sampling techniques include shave or punch biopsy. When only a portion of the lesion can be removed due to its size or location, the biopsy should sample tissue from the thickest area of the lesion, as SCCs are most likely to be detected in that area.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: If a shave biopsy is performed, it should extend through to the level of the dermis in order to provide sufficient tissue for diagnosis; ideally, it would extend to the mid-reticular dermis. Punch biopsy usually extends to the subcutaneous fat when the entire length of the punch blade is utilized.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: On histologic examination, actinic keratoses usually show a collection of atypical keratinocytes with hyperpigmented or pleomorphic nuclei, extending to the basal layer of the epidermis. A "flag sign" is often described, referring to alternating areas of orthokeratosis and parakeratosis. Epidermal thickening and surrounding areas of sun-damaged skin are often seen. The normal ordered maturation of the keratinocytes is disordered to varying degrees: there may be widening of the intracellular spaces, cytologic atypia such as abnormally large nuclei, and a mild chronic inflammatory infiltrate.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Specific findings depend on the clinical variant and particular lesion characteristics. The seven major histopathologic variants are all characterized by atypical keratinocytic proliferation beginning in the basal layer and confined to the epidermis; they include:


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Dermoscopy is a noninvasive technique utilizing a handheld magnifying device coupled with a transilluminating lift. It is often used in the evaluation of cutaneous lesions but lacks the definitive diagnostic ability of biopsy-based tissue diagnosis. Histopathologic exam remains the gold standard.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Polarized contact dermoscopy of AKs occasionally reveals a "rosette sign," described as four white points arranged in a clover pattern, often localized to within a follicular opening. It is hypothesized that the "rosette sign" corresponds histologically to the changes of orthokeratosis and parakeratosis known as the "flag sign."


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Ultraviolet radiation is believed to contribute to the development of actinic keratoses by inducing mutations in epidermal keratinocytes, leading to proliferation of atypical cells. Therefore, preventive measures for AKs are targeted at limiting exposure to solar radiation, including:


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Recent research implicating human papillomavirus (HPV) in the development of AKs suggests that HPV prevention might in turn help prevent development of AKs, as UV-induced mutations and oncogenic transformation are likely facilitated in cases of active HPV infection. A key component of HPV prevention includes vaccination, and the CDC currently recommends routine vaccination in all children at age 11 or 12.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: There is some data that in individuals with a history of non-melanoma skin cancer, a low-fat diet can serve as a preventative measure against future actinic keratoses.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: There are a variety of treatment options for AK depending on the patient and the clinical characteristics of the lesion. AKs show a wide range of features, which guide decision-making in choosing treatment. As there are multiple effective treatments, patient preference and lifestyle are also factors that physicians consider when determining the management plan for actinic keratosis. Regular follow-up is advisable after any treatment to make sure no new lesions have developed and that old ones are not progressing. Adding topical treatment after a procedure may improve outcomes.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Topical medications are often recommended for areas where multiple or ill-defined AKs are present, as the medication can easily be used to treat a relatively large area.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Topical fluorouracil (5-FU) destroys AKs by blocking methylation of thymidylate synthetase, thereby interrupting DNA and RNA synthesis. This in turn prevents the proliferation of dysplastic cells in AK. Topical 5-FU is the most utilized treatment for AK, and often results in effective removal of the lesion. Overall, there is a 50% efficacy rate resulting in 100% clearance of AKs treated with topical 5-FU. 5-FU may be up to 90% effective in treating non-hyperkeratotic lesions. While topical 5-FU is a widely used and cost-effective treatment for AKs and is generally well tolerated, its potential side-effects can include: pain, crusting, redness, and local swelling. These adverse effects can be mitigated or minimized by reducing the frequency of application or taking breaks between uses. The most commonly used application regimen consists of applying a layer of topical cream to the lesion twice a day after washing; duration of treatment is typically 2–4 weeks to thinner skin like the cheeks and up to 8 weeks for the arms; treatment of up to 8 weeks has demonstrated a higher cure rate.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Imiquimod is a topical immune-enhancing agent licensed for the treatment of genital warts. Imiquimod stimulates the immune system through the release and up-regulation of cytokines. Treatment with Imiquimod cream applied 2–3 times per week for 12 to 16 weeks was found to result in complete resolution of AKs in 50% of people, compared to 5% of controls. The Imiquimod 3.75% cream has been validated in a treatment regimen consisting of daily application to entire face and scalp for two 2-week treatment cycles, with a complete clearance rate of 36%.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: While the clearance rate observed with the Imiquimod 3.75% cream was lower than that observed with the 5% cream (36 and 50 percent, respectively), there are lower reported rates of adverse reactions with the 3.75% cream: 19% of individuals using Imiquimod 3.75% cream reported adverse reactions including local erythema, scabbing, and flaking at the application site, while nearly a third of individuals using the 5% cream reported the same types of reactions with Imiquimod treatment. However, it is ultimately difficult to compare the efficacy of the different strength creams directly, as current study data varies in methodology (e.g. duration and frequency of treatment, and amount of skin surface area covered).


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Ingenol mebutate is a newer treatment for AK used in Europe and the United States. It works in two ways, first by disrupting cell membranes and mitochondria resulting cell death, and then by inducing antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity to eliminate remaining tumor cells. A 3-day treatment course with the 0.015% gel is recommended for the scalp and face, while a 2-day treatment course with the 0.05% gel is recommended for the trunk and extremities. Treatment with the 0.015% gel was found to completely clear 57% of AK, while the 0.05% gel had a 34% clearance rate. Advantages of ingenol mebutate treatment include the short duration of therapy and a low recurrence rate. Local skin reactions including pain, itching and redness can be expected during treatment with ingenol mebutate. This treatment was derived from the petty spurge, "Euphorbia peplus" which has been used as a traditional remedy for keratosis.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Topical diclofenac sodium gel is a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug that is thought to work in the treatment of AK through its inhibition of the arachidonic acid pathway, thereby limiting the production of prostaglandins which are thought to be involved in the development of UVB-induced skin cancers. Recommended duration of therapy is 60 to 90 days with twice daily application. Treatment of facial AK with diclofenac gel led to complete lesion resolution in 40% of cases. Common side effects include dryness, itching, redness, and rash at the site of application.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Topical retinoids have been studied in the treatment of AK with modest results, and the American Academy of Dermatology does not currently recommend this as first-line therapy. Treatment with adapalene gel daily for 4 weeks, and then twice daily thereafter for a total of nine months led to a significant but modest reduction in the number AKs compared to placebo; it demonstrated the additional advantage of improving the appearance of photodamaged skin.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Topical tretinoin is ineffective as treatment for reducing the number of AKs. For secondary prevention of AK, systemic, low-dose acitretin was found to be safe, well tolerated and moderately effective in chemoprophylaxis for skin cancers in kidney transplant patients. Acitretin is a viable treatment option for organ transplant patients according to expert opinion.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Tirbanibulin (Klisyri) was approved for medical use in the United States in December 2020, for the treatment of actinic keratosis on the face or scalp.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Liquid nitrogen (−195.8 °C) is the most commonly used destructive therapy for the treatment of AK in the United States. It is a well-tolerated office procedure that does not require anesthesia.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Cryotherapy is particularly indicated for cases where there are fewer than 15 thin, well-demarcated lesions. Caution is encouraged for thicker, more hyperkeratotic lesions, as dysplastic cells may evade treatment. Treatment with both cryotherapy and field treatment can be considered for these more advanced lesions. Cryotherapy is generally performed using an open-spray technique, wherein the AK is sprayed for several seconds.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: The process can be repeated multiple times in one office visit, as tolerated. Cure rates from 67 to 99 percent have been reported, depending on freeze time and lesion characteristics. Disadvantages include discomfort during and after the procedure; blistering, scarring and redness; hypo- or hyperpigmentation; and destruction of healthy tissue.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: AKs are one of the most common dermatologic lesions for which photodynamic therapy, including topical methyl aminolevulinate (MAL) or 5-aminolevulinic acid (5-ALA), is indicated.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Treatment begins with preparation of the lesion, which includes scraping away scales and crusts using a dermal curette. A thick layer of topical MAL or 5-ALA cream is applied to the lesion and a small area surrounding the lesion, which is then covered with an occlusive dressing and left for a period of time. During this time the photosensitizer accumulates in the target cells within the AK lesion. The dressings are then removed and the lesion is treated with light at a specified wavelength.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Multiple treatment regimens using different photosensitizers, incubation times, light sources, and pretreatment regimens have been studied and suggest that longer incubation times lead to higher rates of lesion clearance. Photodynamic therapy is gaining in popularity. It has been found to have a 14% higher likelihood of achieving complete lesion clearance at 3 months compared to cryotherapy, and seems to result in superior cosmetic outcomes when compared to cryotherapy or 5-FU treatment. Photodynamic therapy can be particularly effective in treating areas with multiple AK lesions.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Laser therapy using carbon dioxide () or erbium:yttrium aluminum garnet () lasers is a treatment approach being utilized with increased frequency, and sometimes in conjunction with computer scanning technology. Laser therapy has not been extensively studied, but current evidence suggests it may be effective in cases involving multiple AKs refractive to medical therapy, or AKs located in cosmetically sensitive locations such as the face. The laser has been recommended for extensive actinic cheilitis that has not responded to 5-FU.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: A chemical peel is a topically applied agent that wounds the outermost layer of the skin, promoting organized repair, exfoliation, and eventually the development of smooth and rejuvenated skin. Multiple therapies have been studied. A medium-depth peel may effectively treat multiple non-hyperkeratotic AKs. It can be achieved with 35% to 50% trichloroacetic acid (TCA) alone or at 35% in combination with Jessner's solution in a once-daily application for a minimum of 3 weeks; 70% glycolic acid (α-hydroxy acid); or solid . When compared to treatment with 5-FU, chemical peels have demonstrated similar efficacy and increased ease of use with similar morbidity. Chemical peels must be performed in a controlled clinic environment and are recommended only for individuals who are able to comply with follow-up precautions, including avoidance of sun exposure. Furthermore, they should be avoided in individuals with a history of HSV infection or keloids, and in those who are immunosuppressed or who are taking photosensitizing medications.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Untreated AKs follow one of three paths: they can either persist as AKs, regress, or progress to invasive skin cancer, as AK lesions are considered to be on the same continuum with squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). AK lesions that regress also have the potential to recur.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Given the aforementioned differering clinical outcomes, it is difficult to predict the clinical course of any given actinic keratosis. AK lesions may also come and go—in a cycle of appearing on the skin, remaining for months, and then disappearing. Often they will reappear in a few weeks or months, particularly after unprotected sun exposure. Left untreated, there is a chance that the lesion will advance to become invasive. Although it is difficult to predict whether an AK will advance to become squamous cell carcinoma, it has been noted that squamous cell carcinomas originate in lesions formerly diagnosed as AKs with frequencies reported between 65 and 97%.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Actinic keratosis is very common, with an estimated 14% of dermatology visits related to AKs. It is seen more often in fair-skinned individuals, and rates vary with geographical location and age. Other factors such as exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation, certain phenotypic features, and immunosuppression can also contribute to the development of AKs.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Men are more likely to develop AK than women, and the risk of developing AK lesions increases with age. These findings have been observed in multiple studies, with numbers from one study suggesting that approximately 5% of women ages 20–29 develop AK compared to 68% of women ages 60–69, and 10% of men ages 20–29 develop AK compared to 79% of men ages 60–69.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Geography seems to play a role in the sense that individuals living in locations where they are exposed to more UV radiation throughout their lifetime have a significantly higher risk of developing AK. Much of the literature on AK comes from Australia, where the prevalence of AK is estimated at 40–50% in adults over 40, as compared to the United States and Europe, where prevalence is estimated at under 11–38% in adults. One study found that those who immigrated to Australia after age 20 had fewer AKs than native Australians in all age groups.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: Diagnostically, researchers are investigating the role of novel biomarkers to assist in determining which AKs are more likely to develop into cutaneous or metastatic SCC. Upregulation of matrix metalloproteinases (MMP) is seen in many different types of cancers, and the expression and production of MMP-7 in particular has been found to be elevated in SCC specifically. The role of serin peptidase inhibitors (Serpins) is also being investigated. SerpinA1 was found to be elevated in the keratinocytes of SCC cell lines, and SerpinA1 upregulation was correlated with SCC tumor progression "in vivo". Further investigation into specific biomarkers could help providers better assess prognosis and determine best treatment approaches for particular lesions.


title: Actinic keratosis

text: In terms of treatment, a number of medications are being studied. Resiquimod is a TLR 7/8 agonist that works similarly to imiquimod, but is 10 to 100 times more potent; when used to treat AK lesions, complete response rates have range from 40 to 74%. Afamelanotide is a drug that induces the production of melanin by melanocytes to act as a protective factor against UVB radiation. It is being studied to determine its efficacy in preventing AKs in organ transplant patients who are on immunosuppressive therapy. Epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) inhibitors such as gefitinib, and anti-EGFR antibodies such as cetuximab are used in the treatment of various types of cancers, and are currently being investigated for potential use in the treatment and prevention of AKs.


title: Younger Futhark

text: The Younger Futhark, also called Scandinavian runes, is a runic alphabet and a reduced form of the Elder Futhark, with only 16 characters, in use from about the 9th century, after a "transitional period" during the 7th and 8th centuries.


title: Younger Futhark

text: The reduction, somewhat paradoxically, happened at the same time as phonetic changes that led to a greater number of different phonemes in the spoken language, when Proto-Norse evolved into Old Norse. Also, the writing custom avoided carving the same rune consecutively for the same sound, so the spoken distinction between long and short vowels was lost in writing. Thus, the language included distinct sounds and minimal pairs that were written the same.


title: Younger Futhark

text: The Younger Futhark is divided into long-branch (Danish) and short-twig (Swedish and Norwegian) runes; in the 10th century, it was further expanded by the "Hälsinge Runes" or staveless runes.


title: Younger Futhark

text: The lifetime of the Younger Futhark corresponds roughly to the Viking Age. Their use declined after the Christianization of Scandinavia; most writing in Scandinavia from the 12th century was in the Latin alphabet, but the runic scripts survived in marginal use in the form of the medieval runes (in use ca. 1100–1500) and the Latinised Dalecarlian runes (ca. 1500–1910).


title: Younger Futhark

text: Usage of the Younger Futhark is found in Scandinavia and Viking Age settlements abroad, probably in use from the 9th century onward. During the Migration Period Elder Futhark had been an actual "secret" known to only a literate elite, with only some 350 surviving inscriptions. Literacy in the Younger Futhark became widespread in Scandinavia, as witnessed by the great number of Runestones (some 3,000), sometimes inscribed with almost casual notes.


title: Younger Futhark

text: During a phase from about 650 to 800, some inscriptions mixed the use of Elder and Younger Futhark runes.


title: Younger Futhark

text: Examples of inscriptions considered to be from this period include DR 248 from Snoldelev, DR 357 from Stentoften, DR 358 from Gummarp, DR 359 from Istaby, and DR 360 from Björketorp, and objects such as the Setre Comb (N KJ40). Ög 136 in Rök, which uses Elder Futhark runes to encrypt part of the text, and Ög 43 in Ingelstad, which uses a single Elder Futhark rune as an ideogram, are also sometimes included as transitional inscriptions.


title: Younger Futhark

text: By the late 8th century, the reduction from 24 to 16 runes was complete. The main change was that the difference between voiced and unvoiced consonants was no longer expressed in writing. Other changes are the consequence of sound changes that separate Old Norse from Proto-Norse and Common Germanic (mostly changes to the vowel system).


title: Younger Futhark

text: The Younger Futhark became known in Europe as the "alphabet of the Norsemen", and was studied in the interest of trade and diplomatic contacts, referred to as in Frankish Fulda (possibly by Walahfrid Strabo) and "Ogham of the Scandinavians" in the Book of Ballymote.


title: Younger Futhark

text: The names of the 16 runes of the Younger futhark are recorded in the Icelandic and Norwegian rune poems. The names are:


title: Younger Futhark

text: From comparison with Anglo-Saxon and Gothic letter names, most of these names directly continue the names of the Elder Futhark runes. The exceptions to this are:


title: Younger Futhark

text: The Younger Futhark is divided into long-branch (Danish) and short-twig (Swedish and Norwegian) runes. The difference between the two versions has been a matter of controversy. A general opinion is that the difference was functional, i.e. the long-branch runes were used for documentation on stone, whereas the short-twig runes were in everyday use for private or official messages on wood.


title: Younger Futhark

text: In the short-twig runes (or Rök runes), nine runes appear as simplified variants of the long-branch runes, while the remaining seven have identical shapes:


title: Younger Futhark

text: Hälsinge runes are so named because in modern times they were first noticed in the Hälsingland region of Sweden. Later, other runic inscriptions with the same runes were found in other parts of Sweden. They were used between the 10th and 12th centuries. The runes seem to be a simplification of the Swedish-Norwegian runes and lack certain strokes, hence the name "staveless". They cover the same set of staves as the other Younger Futhark alphabets. This variant has no assigned Unicode range (as of Unicode 12.1).


title: Younger Futhark

text: In the Middle Ages, the Younger Futhark in Scandinavia was expanded, so that it once more contained one sign for each phoneme of the old Norse language. Dotted variants of voiceless signs were introduced to denote the corresponding voiced consonants, or vice versa, voiceless variants of voiced consonants, and several new runes also appeared for vowel sounds. Inscriptions in medieval Scandinavian runes show a large number of variant rune-forms, and some letters, such as "s," "c" and "z," were often used interchangeably.


title: Younger Futhark

text: Medieval runes were in use until the 15th century. Of the total number of Norwegian runic inscriptions preserved today, most are medieval runes. Notably, more than 600 inscriptions using these runes have been discovered in Bergen since the 1950s, mostly on wooden sticks (the so-called Bryggen inscriptions). This indicates that runes were in common use side by side with the Latin alphabet for several centuries. Indeed, some of the medieval runic inscriptions are actually in the Latin language.


title: Younger Futhark

text: After the 15th century interest in rune history and their use in magical processes grew in Iceland, with various studies beginning with Third Grammatical Icelandic Treatise - Málfræðinnar grundvǫllr. Publications written in Latin and Danish in the 1600s included works by Arngrímur Jónsson, Runólfur Jónsson and Dr. Olaus Wormius. Content from these along with Icelandic and Norwegian Rune Poems appeared frequently in subsequent manuscripts written in Iceland.


title: Younger Futhark

text: According to Carl-Gustav Werner, "in the isolated province of Dalarna in Sweden a mix of runes and Latin letters developed" (Werner 2004, p. 7). The Dalecarlian runes came into use in the early 16th century and remained in some use up to the 20th century. Some discussion remains on whether their use was an unbroken tradition throughout this period or whether people in the 19th and 20th centuries learned runes from books written on the subject. The character inventory is suitable for transcribing modern Swedish and the local Dalecarlian language.


title: Western canon

text: The Western canon is the body of high culture literature, music, philosophy, and works of art that are highly valued in the West; works that have achieved the status of classics. However, not all these works originate in the Western world, and such works are also valued throughout the globe. It is "a certain Western intellectual tradition that goes from, say, Socrates to Wittgenstein in philosophy, and from Homer to James Joyce in literature".


title: Western canon

text: A classic is a book, or any other work of art, accepted as being exemplary or noteworthy. In the second century Roman miscellany "Attic Nights", Aulus Gellius refers to a writer as "classicus... scriptor, non proletarius" ("A distinguished, not a commonplace writer"). Such classification began with the Greeks' "ranking" their cultural works, with the word "canon" (ancient Greek κανών, kanṓn: "measuring rod, standard"). Moreover, early Christian Church Fathers used "canon" to rank the authoritative texts of the New Testament, preserving them, given the expense of vellum and papyrus and mechanical book reproduction, thus, being comprehended in a "canon" ensured a book's preservation as the best way to retain information about a civilization. In contemporary use, the Western canon defines the best of Western culture. In the ancient world, at the Alexandrian Library, scholars coined the Greek term "Hoi enkrithentes" ("the admitted", "the included") to identify the writers in the canon. Although the term is often associated with the Western canon, it can be applied to works of literature, music and art, etc. from all traditions, such as the Chinese classics or the Vedas.


title: Western canon

text: With regard to books, what makes a book "classic" has concerned various authors, from Mark Twain to Italo Calvino, and questions such as "Why Read the Classics?", and "What Is a Classic?" have been considered by others, including T. S. Eliot, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Michael Dirda, and Ezra Pound.


title: Western canon

text: The terms "classic book" and Western canon are closely related concepts, but are not necessarily synonymous. A "canon" is a list of books considered to be "essential", and it can be published as a collection (such as Great Books of the Western World, Modern Library, Everyman's Library, or Penguin Classics), presented as a list with an academic's imprimatur (such as Harold Bloom's,) or be the official reading list of a university. In "The Western Canon" Bloom lists "the major Western writers" as Dante Aligheri, Geoffrey Chaucer, Miguel de Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust.


title: Western canon

text: The Bible, a product of ancient Jewish culture, from the Levant, in Western Asia, has been a major force in shaping Western culture, and "has inspired some of the great monuments of human thought, literature, and art".


title: Western canon

text: A university or college Great Books Program is a program inspired by the Great Books movement begun in the United States in the 1920s by Prof. John Erskine of Columbia University, which proposed to improve the higher education system by returning it to the western liberal arts tradition of broad cross-disciplinary learning. These academics and educators included Robert Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, Stringfellow Barr, Scott Buchanan, Jacques Barzun, and Alexander Meiklejohn. The view among them was that the emphasis on narrow specialization in American colleges had harmed the quality of higher education by failing to expose students to the important products of Western civilization and thought.


title: Western canon

text: The essential component of such programs is a high degree of engagement with primary texts, called the Great Books. The curricula of Great Books programs often follow a canon of texts considered more or less essential to a student's education, such as Plato's "Republic", or Dante's "Divine Comedy". Such programs often focus exclusively on Western culture. Their employment of primary texts dictates an interdisciplinary approach, as most of the Great Books do not fall neatly under the prerogative of a single contemporary academic discipline. Great Books programs often include designated discussion groups as well as lectures, and have small class sizes. In general students in such programs receive an abnormally high degree of attention from their professors, as part of the overall aim of fostering a community of learning.


title: Western canon

text: Over 100 institutions of higher learning, mostly in the United States, offer some version of a Great Books Program as an option for students.


title: Western canon

text: For much of the 20th century, the Modern Library provided a larger convenient list of the Western canon, i.e. those books any person (or any English-speaking person) needed to know in order to claim an excellent general education. The list numbered more than 300 items by the 1950s, by authors from Aristotle to Albert Camus, and has continued to grow. When in the 1990s the concept of the Western canon was vehemently condemned, just as earlier Modern Library lists had been criticized as "too American," Modern Library responded by preparing new lists of "100 Best Novels" and "100 Best Nonfiction" compiled by famous writers, and later compiled lists nominated by book purchasers and readers.


title: Western canon

text: Some intellectuals have championed a "high conservative modernism" that insists that universal truths exist, and have opposed approaches that deny the existence of universal truths. Yale University Professor of Humanities and famous literary critic Harold Bloom has also argued strongly in favor of the canon, in his 1994 book "", and in general the canon remains as a represented idea in many institutions. Allan Bloom (no relation), in his highly influential "The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students" (1987), argues that moral degradation results from ignorance of the great classics that shaped Western culture. Bloom further comments: "But one thing is certain: wherever the Great Books make up a central part of the curriculum, the students are excited and satisfied." His book was widely cited by some intellectuals for its argument that the classics contained universal truths and timeless values which were being ignored by cultural relativists.


title: Western canon

text: Classicist Bernard Knox made direct reference to this topic when he delivered his 1992 Jefferson Lecture (the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities). Knox used the intentionally "provocative" title "The Oldest Dead White European Males" as the title of his lecture and his subsequent book of the same name, in both of which Knox defended the continuing relevance of classical culture to modern society.


title: Western canon

text: Defenders maintain that those who undermine the canon do so out of primarily political interests, and that such criticisms are misguided and/or disingenuous. As John Searle, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, has written:


title: Western canon

text: One of the main objections to a canon of literature is the question of authority; who should have the power to determine what works are worth reading?


title: Western canon

text: Charles Altieri, of the University of California, Berkeley, states that canons are "an institutional form for exposing people to a range of idealized attitudes." It is according to this notion that work may be removed from the canon over time to reflect the contextual relevance and thoughts of society. American historian Todd M. Compton argues that canons are always communal in nature; that there are limited canons for, say a literature survey class, or an English department reading list, but there is no such thing as one absolute canon of literature. Instead, there are many conflicting canons. He regards Bloom's "Western Canon" as a personal canon only.


title: Western canon

text: The process of defining the boundaries of the canon is endless. The philosopher John Searle has said, "In my experience there never was, in fact, a fixed 'canon'; there was rather a certain set of tentative judgments about what had importance and quality. Such judgments are always subject to revision, and in fact they were constantly being revised." One of the notable attempts at compiling an authoritative canon for literature in the English-speaking world was the "Great Books of the Western World" program. This program, developed in the middle third of the 20th century, grew out of the curriculum at the University of Chicago. University president Robert Maynard Hutchins and his collaborator Mortimer Adler developed a program that offered reading lists, books, and organizational strategies for reading clubs to the general public. An earlier attempt had been made in 1909 by Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot, with the Harvard Classics, a 51-volume anthology of classic works from world literature. Eliot's view was the same as that of Scottish philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle: "The true University of these days is a Collection of Books". ("The Hero as Man of Letters", 1840)


title: Western canon

text: The canon of Renaissance English poetry of the 16th and early 17th century has always been in some form of flux and towards the end of the 20th century the established canon was criticised, especially by those who wished to expand it to include, for example, more women writers. However, the central figures of the British renaissance canon remain, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Donne. Spenser, Donne, and Jonson were major influences on 17th-century poetry. However, poet John Dryden condemned aspects of the metaphysical poets in his criticism. In the 18th century Metaphysical poetry fell into further disrepute, while the interest in Elizabethan poetry was rekindled through the scholarship of Thomas Warton and others. However, the canon of Renaissance poetry was formed in the Victorian period with anthologies like Palgrave's "Golden Treasury".


title: Western canon

text: In the twentieth century T. S. Eliot and Yvor Winters were two literary critics who were especially concerned with revising the canon of renaissance English literature. Eliot, for example, championed poet Sir John Davies in an article in "The Times Literary Supplement" in 1926. During the course of the 1920s, Eliot did much to establish the importance of the metaphysical school, both through his critical writing and by applying their method in his own work. However, by 1961 A. Alvarez was commenting that "it may perhaps be a little late in the day to be writing about the Metaphysicals. The great vogue for Donne passed with the passing of the Anglo-American experimental movement in modern poetry." Two decades later, a hostile view was expressed that emphasis on their importance had been an attempt by Eliot and his followers to impose a 'high Anglican and royalist literary history' on 17th-century English poetry.


title: Western canon

text: The American critic Yvor Winters suggested in 1939 an alternative canon of Elizabethan poetry, which would exclude the famous representatives of the Petrarchan school of poetry, represented by Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. Winters claimed that the Native or Plain Style "anti-Petrarchan" movement had been undervalued and argued that George Gascoigne (1525–1577) "deserves to be ranked […] among the six or seven greatest lyric poets of the century, and perhaps higher".


title: Western canon

text: In the twentieth century there was a general reassessment of the literary canon, including women's writing, post-colonial literatures, gay and lesbian literature, writing by people of colour, working people's writing, and the cultural productions of historically marginalized groups. This reassessment has resulted in a whole scale expansion of what is considered "literature", and genres hitherto not regarded as "literary", such as children's writing, journals, letters, travel writing, and many others are now the subjects of scholarly interest.


title: Western canon

text: The Western literary canon has also expanded to include the literature of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America. Writers from Africa, Turkey, China, Egypt, Peru, and Colombia, Japan, etc., have received Nobel prizes since the late 1960s. Writers from Asia and Africa have also been nominated for, and also won, the Booker prize in recent years.


title: Western canon

text: Susan Hardy Aitken argues that the Western canon has maintained itself by excluding and marginalising women, whilst idealising the works of European men. Where women's work is introduced it can be considered inappropriately rather than recognising the importance of their work; a work's greatness is judged against socially situated factors which exclude women, whilst being portrayed as an intellectual approach.


title: Western canon

text: The feminist movement produced both feminist fiction and non-fiction and created new interest in women's writing. It also prompted a general reevaluation of women's historical and academic contributions in response to the belief that women's lives and contributions have been underrepresented as areas of scholarly interest.


title: Western canon

text: However, in Britain and America at least women achieved major literary success from the late eighteenth century, and many major nineteenth-century British novelists were women, including Jane Austen, the Brontë family, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot. There were also three major female poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson. In the twentieth century there were also many major female writers, including Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, and Marianne Moore. Notable female writers in France include Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Yourcenar, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras and Françoise Sagan.


title: Western canon

text: Much of the early period of feminist literary scholarship was given over to the rediscovery and reclamation of texts written by women. Virago Press began to publish its large list of 19th and early 20th-century novels in 1975 and became one of the first commercial presses to join in the project of reclamation.


title: Western canon

text: In the twentieth century, the Western literary canon started to include African writers not only from African-American writers, but also from the wider African diaspora of writers in Britain, France, Latin America, and Africa. This correlated largely with the shift in social and political views during the civil rights movement in the United States. The first global recognition came in 1950 when Gwendolyn Brooks was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for Literature. Chinua Achebe's novel "Things Fall Apart" helped draw attention to African literature. Nigerian Wole Soyinka was the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, and American Toni Morrison was the first African-American woman to win in 1993.


title: Western canon

text: Some early Afro-American writers were inspired to defy ubiquitous racial prejudice by proving themselves equal to European American authors. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has said, "it is fair to describe the subtext of the history of black letters as this urge to refute the claim that because blacks had no written traditions they were bearers of an inferior culture."


title: Western canon

text: African-American writers were also attempting to subvert the literary and power traditions of the United States. Some scholars assert that writing has traditionally been seen as "something defined by the dominant culture as a white male activity." This means that, in American society, literary acceptance has traditionally been intimately tied in with the very power dynamics which perpetrated such evils as racial discrimination. By borrowing from and incorporating the non-written oral traditions and folk life of the African diaspora, African-American literature broke "the mystique of connection between literary authority and patriarchal power." In producing their own literature, African Americans were able to establish their own literary traditions devoid of the European intellectual filter. This view of African-American literature as a tool in the struggle for African-American political and cultural liberation has been stated for decades, most famously by W. E. B. Du Bois.


title: Western canon

text: Since the 1960s the Western literary canon has been expanded to include writers from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. This is reflected in the Nobel prizes awarded in literature.


title: Western canon

text: Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) was a Japanese novelist and short story writer whose spare, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award. His works have enjoyed broad international appeal and are still widely read.


title: Western canon

text: Naguib Mahfouz (1911 – 2006) was an Egyptian writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. He is regarded as one of the first contemporary writers of Arabic literature, along with Tawfiq el-Hakim, to explore themes of existentialism. He published 34 novels, over 350 short stories, dozens of movie scripts, and five plays over a 70-year career. Many of his works have been made into Egyptian and foreign films.


title: Western canon

text: Kenzaburō Ōe (b. 1935) is a Japanese writer and a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature. His novels, short stories, and essays, strongly influenced by French and American literature and literary theory, deal with political, social, and philosophical issues, including nuclear weapons, nuclear power, social non-conformism, and existentialism. Ōe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994 for creating "an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today".


title: Western canon

text: Guan Moye (b. 1955), better known by the pen name "Mo Yan", is a Chinese novelist and short story writer. Donald Morrison of the U.S. news magazine "TIME" referred to him as "one of the most famous, oft-banned and widely pirated of all Chinese writers", and Jim Leach called him the Chinese answer to Franz Kafka or Joseph Heller. He is best known to Western readers for his 1987 novel "Red Sorghum Clan", of which the "Red Sorghum" and "Sorghum Wine" volumes were later adapted for the film "Red Sorghum". In 2012, Mo was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work as a writer "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".


title: Western canon

text: Orhan Pamuk (b. 1952) is a Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic, and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. One of Turkey's most prominent novelists, his work has sold over thirteen million books in sixty-three languages, making him the country's best-selling writer. Pamuk is the author of novels including "The White Castle", "The Black Book", "The New Life", "My Name Is Red", "Snow", "The Museum of Innocence", and "A Strangeness in My Mind". He is the Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he teaches writing and comparative literature.


title: Western canon

text: Born in Istanbul, Pamuk is the first Turkish Nobel laureate. He is also the recipient of numerous other literary awards. "My Name Is Red" won the 2002 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, 2002 Premio Grinzane Cavour, and 2003 International Dublin Literary Award.


title: Western canon

text: Octavio Paz Lozano (1914–1998) was a Mexican poet and diplomat. For his body of work, he was awarded the 1981 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature.


title: Western canon

text: Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, and journalist. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century and one of the best in the Spanish language, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.


title: Western canon

text: García Márquez started as a journalist, and wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novels, such as "One Hundred Years of Solitude" (1967), "The Autumn of the Patriarch" (1975), and "Love in the Time of Cholera" (1985). His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style labeled as magic realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. Some of his works are set in a fictional village called Macondo (the town mainly inspired by his birthplace Aracataca), and most of them explore the theme of solitude. On his death in April 2014, Juan Manuel Santos, the President of Colombia, described him as "the greatest Colombian who ever lived."


title: Western canon

text: Mario Vargas Llosa, (b. 1936) is a Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, essayist, college professor, and recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. Upon announcing the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy said it had been given to Vargas Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat".


title: Western canon

text: Many philosophers today agree that Greek philosophy has influenced much of Western culture since its inception. Alfred North Whitehead once noted: "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." Clear, unbroken lines of influence lead from ancient Greek and Hellenistic philosophers to Early Islamic philosophy, the European Renaissance, and the Age of Enlightenment.


title: Western canon

text: Plato was a philosopher in Classical Greece and the founder of the Academy in Athens. He is widely considered the most pivotal figure in the development of philosophy, especially the Western tradition.


title: Western canon

text: Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher. His writings cover many subjects – including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, rhetoric, linguistics, politics and government—and constitute the first comprehensive system of Western philosophy. Aristotle's views on physical science had a profound influence on medieval scholarship. Their influence extended from Late Antiquity into the Renaissance, and his views were not replaced systematically until the Enlightenment and theories such as classical mechanics. In metaphysics, Aristotelianism profoundly influenced Judeo-Islamic philosophical and theological thought during the Middle Ages and continues to influence Christian theology, especially the Neoplatonism of the Early Church and the scholastic tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. Aristotle was well known among medieval Muslim intellectuals and revered as "The First Teacher" (). His ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics.


title: Western canon

text: The vast body of Christian philosophy is typically represented on reading lists mainly by Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas. The academic canon of early modern philosophy generally includes Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant.


title: Western canon

text: Major philosophers of the Renaissance include Niccolò Machiavelli, Michel de Montaigne, Pico della Mirandola, Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno.


title: Western canon

text: The seventeenth century was important for philosophy, and the major figures were Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Baruch Spinoza, John Locke and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.


title: Western canon

text: Major philosophers of the eighteenth century include George Berkeley, Montesquieu, Voltaire, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham.


title: Western canon

text: Important nineteenth century philosophers include Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), Arthur Schopenhauer, Auguste Comte, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Friedrich Nietzsche.


title: Western canon

text: Major twentieth century figures include Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Simone Weil, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas. A porous distinction between analytic and continental approaches emerged during this period.


title: Western canon

text: Classical music forms the core of canon music and remains mostly unchanged to our days. It integrates a huge body of works starting from the 17th century and are reproduced on an ensemble of all acoustic musical instruments that were common in that century's Europe.


title: Western canon

text: The term "classical music" did not appear until the early 19th century, in an attempt to distinctly canonize the period from Johann Sebastian Bach to Ludwig van Beethoven as a golden age. In addition to Bach and Beethoven, the other major figures from this period were George Frideric Handel, Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The earliest reference to "classical music" recorded by the "Oxford English Dictionary" is from about 1836.


title: Western canon

text: In classical music, during the nineteenth century a "canon" developed which focused on what was felt to be the most important works written since 1600, with a great concentration on the later part of this period, termed the Classical period, which is generally taken to begin around 1750. After Beethoven, the major nineteenth-century composers include Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Frédéric Chopin, Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner, Giuseppe Verdi, Gustav Mahler, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.


title: Western canon

text: In the 2000s, the standard concert repertoire of professional orchestras, chamber music groups, and choirs tends to focus on works by a relatively small number of mainly 18th- and 19th-century male composers. Many of the works deemed to be part of the musical canon are from genres regarded as the most "serious", such as the symphony, concerto, string quartet, and opera. Folk music was already giving art music melodies, and from the late 19th century, in an atmosphere of increasing nationalism, folk music began to influence composers in formal and other ways, before being admitted to some sort of status in the canon itself.


title: Western canon

text: Since the early twentieth century non-Western music has begun to influence Western composers. In particular, direct homages to Javanese gamelan music are found in works for western instruments by Claude Debussy, Béla Bartók, Francis Poulenc, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Benjamin Britten, John Cage, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. Debussy was immensely interested in non-Western music and its approaches to composition. Specifically, he was drawn to the Javanese gamelan, which he first heard at the 1889 Paris Exposition. He was not interested in directly quoting his non-Western influences, but instead allowed this non-Western aesthetic to generally influence his own musical work, for example, by frequently using quiet, unresolved dissonances, coupled with the damper pedal, to emulate the "shimmering" effect created by a gamelan ensemble. American composer Philip Glass was not only influenced by the eminent French composition teacher Nadia Boulanger, but also by the Indian musicians Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha, His distinctive style arose from his work with Shankar and Rakha and their perception of rhythm in Indian music as being entirely additive.


title: Western canon

text: In the latter half of the 20th century the canon expanded to cover the so-called Early music of the pre-classical period, and Baroque music by composers other than Bach and George Frideric Handel. including Antonio Vivaldi, Claudio Monteverdi, Domenico Scarlatti, Alessandro Scarlatti, Henry Purcell, Georg Philipp Telemann, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Arcangelo Corelli, François Couperin, Heinrich Schütz, and Dieterich Buxtehude. Earlier composers, such as Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Orlande de Lassus and William Byrd, have also received more attention in the last hundred years.


title: Western canon

text: The absence of women composers from the classical canon was brought to the forefront of musicological literature in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Even though many women composers have written music in the common practice period and beyond, their works remain extremely underrepresented in concert programs, music history curriculums, and music anthologies. In particular, musicologist Marcia J Citron has examined "the practices and attitudes that have led to the exclusion of women composers from the received 'canon' of performed musical works." Since around 1980 the music of Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179), a German Benedictine abbess, and Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho (born 1952) has begun to enter the canon. Saariaho's opera "L'amour de loin" has been staged in some of the world's major opera houses, including The English National Opera (2009) and in 2016 the Metropolitan Opera in New York.


title: Western canon

text: The classical ensemble canon very rarely integrates musical instruments that are not acoustic and of western origins, it stayed apart from the wide use of electric, electronic and digital instruments that are so common in today's popular music.


title: Western canon

text: The backbone of traditional Western art history are artworks commissioned by wealthy patrons for private or public enjoyment. Much of this was religious art, mostly Roman Catholic art. The classical art of Greece and Rome has, since the Renaissance, been the fount of the Western tradition.


title: Western canon

text: Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) is the originator of the artistic canon and the originator of many of the concepts it embodies. His "Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects" covers only artists working in Italy, with a strong pro-Florentine prejudice, and has cast a long shadow over succeeding centuries. Northern European art has arguably never quite caught up to Italy in terms of prestige, and Vasari's placing of Giotto as the founding father of "modern" painting has largely been retained. In painting, the rather vague term of Old master covers painters up to about the time of Goya.


title: Western canon

text: This "canon" remains prominent, as indicated by the selection present in art history textbooks, as well as the prices obtained in the art trade. But there have been considerable swings in what is valued. In the 19th century the Baroque fell into great disfavour, but it was revived from around the 1920s, by which time the art of the 18th and 19th century was largely disregarded. The High Renaissance, which Vasari regarded as the greatest period, has always retained its prestige, including works by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael, but the succeeding period of Mannerism has fallen in and out of favour.


title: Western canon

text: In the 19th century the beginnings of academic art history, led by German universities, led to much better understanding and appreciation of medieval art, and a more nuanced understanding of classical art, including the realization that many if not most treasured masterpieces of sculpture were late Roman copies rather than Greek originals. The European tradition of art was expanded to include Byzantine art and the new discoveries of archaeology, notably Etruscan art, Celtic art and Upper Paleolithic art.


title: Western canon

text: Since the 20th century there has been an effort to re-define the discipline to be more inclusive of art made by women; vernacular creativity, especially in printed media; and an expansion to include works in the Western tradition produced outside Europe. At the same time there has been a much greater appreciation of non-Western traditions, including their place with Western art in wider global or Eurasian traditions. The decorative arts have traditionally had a much lower critical status than fine art, although often highly valued by collectors, and still tend to be given little prominence in undergraduate studies or popular coverage on television and in print.


title: Western canon

text: English artist and sculptor Barbara Hepworth DBE (1903 – 1975), whose work exemplifies Modernism, and in particular modern sculpture, is one of the few female artists to achieve international prominence. In 2016 the art of American modernist Georgia O'Keeffe has been staged at the Tate Modern, in London, and is then moving in December 2016 to Vienna, Austria, before visiting the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada in 2017.


title: Western canon

text: Women were discriminated against in terms of obtaining the training necessary to be an artist in the mainstream Western traditions. In addition, since the Renaissance the nude, more often than not female, has had a special position as subject matter. In her 1971 essay, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?", Linda Nochlin analyzes what she sees as the embedded privilege in the predominantly male Western art world and argues that women's outsider status allowed them a unique viewpoint to not only critique women's position in art, but to additionally examine the discipline's underlying assumptions about gender and ability. Nochlin's essay develops the argument that both formal and social education restricted artistic development to men, preventing women (with rare exception) from honing their talents and gaining entry into the art world.


title: Western canon

text: In the 1970s, feminist art criticism continued this critique of the institutionalized sexism of art history, art museums, and galleries, and questioned which genres of art were deemed museum-worthy. This position is articulated by artist Judy Chicago:


title: Western canon

text: "[I]t is crucial to understand that one of the ways in which the importance of male experience is conveyed is through the art objects that are exhibited and preserved in our museums. Whereas men experience presence in our art institutions, women experience primarily absence, except in images that do not necessarily reflect women's own sense of themselves."


title: Western canon

text: The preface to the Blackwell anthology of "Renaissance Literature" from 2003 acknowledges the importance of online access to literary texts on the selection of what to include, meaning that the selection can be made on basis of functionality rather than representativity". This anthology has made its selection based on three principles. One is "unabashedly "canonical"", meaning that Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson have been given the space prospective users would expect. A second principle is "non-canonical", giving female writers such as Anne Askew, Elizabeth Cary, Emilia Lanier, Martha Moulsworth, and Lady Mary Wroth a representative selection. It also includes texts that may not be representative of the qualitatively best efforts of Renaissance literature, but of the quantitatively most numerous texts, such as homilies and erotica. A third principle has been thematic, so that the anthology aims to include texts that shed light on issues of special interest to contemporary scholars.


title: Western canon

text: The Blackwell anthology is still firmly organised around authors, however. A different strategy has been observed by "The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse" from 1992. Here the texts are organised according to topic, under the headings "The Public World", "Images of Love", "Topographies", "Friends, Patrons and the Good Life", "Church, State and Belief", "Elegy and Epitaph", "Translation", "Writer, Language and Public". It is arguable that such an approach is more suitable for the interested reader than for the student. While the two anthologies are not directly comparable, since the Blackwell anthology also includes prose and the Penguin anthology goes up to 1659, it is telling that while the larger Blackwell anthology contains work by 48 poets, seven of which are women, the Penguin anthology contains 374 poems by 109 poets, including 13 women and one poet each in Welsh, Siôn Phylip, and Irish, Eochaidh Ó Heóghusa.


title: Western canon

text: The Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century is a list of books compiled in 1999 by Literaturhaus München and Bertelsmann, in which 99 prominent German authors, literary critics, and scholars of German ranked the most significant German-language novels of the twentieth century. The group brought together 23 experts from each of the three categories. Each was allowed to name three books as having been the most important of the century. Cited by the group were five titles by both Franz Kafka and Arno Schmidt, four by Robert Walser, and three by Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, Anna Seghers, and Joseph Roth.


title: Western canon

text: The Canon of Dutch Literature comprises a list of 1000 works of Dutch-language literature important to the cultural heritage of the Low Countries, and is published on the DBNL. Several of these works are lists themselves; such as early dictionaries, lists of songs, recipes, biographies, or encyclopedic compilations of information such as mathematical, scientific, medical, or plant reference books. Other items include early translations of literature from other countries, history books, first-hand diaries, and published correspondence. Notable original works can be found by author name.


title: Western canon

text: The Danish Culture Canon consists of 108 works of cultural excellence in eight categories: architecture, visual arts, design and crafts, film, literature, music, performing arts, and children's culture. An initiative of Brian Mikkelsen in 2004, it was developed by a series of committees under the auspices of the Danish Ministry of Culture in 2006–2007 as "a collection and presentation of the greatest, most important works of Denmark's cultural heritage." Each category contains 12 works, although music contains 12 works of score music and 12 of popular music, and the literature section's 12th item is an anthology of 24 works.


title: Western canon

text: Världsbiblioteket ("The World Library") was a Swedish list of the 100 best books in the world, created in 1991 by the Swedish literary magazine "Tidningen Boken". The list was compiled through votes from members of the Svenska Akademien, Swedish Crime Writers' Academy, librarians, authors, and others. Approximately 30 of the books were Swedish.


title: Western canon

text: For the Spanish culture, specially for the Spanish literature, during the 19th and the first third of the 20th century similar lists were created trying to define the literary canon. This canon was established mainly through teaching programs, and literary critics like Pedro Estala, Antonio Gil y Zárate, Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, or Juan Bautista Bergua. In the last decades, other important critics have been contributing to the topic, among them, Fernando Lázaro Carreter, José Manuel Blecua Perdices, Francisco Rico, and José Carlos Mainer.


title: Western canon

text: Other Spanish languages have also their own literary canons. A good introduction to the Catalan literary canon is "La invenció de la tradició literària" by Manel Ollé, from the Open University of Catalonia.


title: Western canon

text: More recent discussions have been centered on expanding the canon of books to include more women and racial minorities, while the canons of music and the visual arts have greatly expanded to cover the Middle Ages, and subsequent centuries once largely overlooked. But some examples of newer media such as cinema have attained a precarious position in the canon. Also during the twentieth century there has been a growing interest in the West, as well as globally, in major artistic works of the cultures of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, including the former colonies of European nations.


title: Western canon

text: Expansion and changes to the canon have been criticized, for example from the School of Resentment, which argues that some proposed changes promote political and social activism at the expense of aesthetic values. Broadly, schools of resentment approaches associate such changes with Marxist critical theory, including African-American studies, Marxist literary criticism, New Historicist criticism, feminist criticism and post-structuralism—specifically as promoted by Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.


title: Western canon

text: A different criticism comes for narrow interpretation of the concept of the West. This criticism argues that the Western canon is dominated by British and American culture, with a small dose of ancient western classics and a few non-English works, primarily from other Western European countries (like Germany or France), and almost no works from other regions such as Eastern Europe.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: Major Dhyan Chand (29 August 1905 – 3 December 1979) was an Indian field hockey player, widely regarded as one of the greatest field hockey players in history. He was known for his extraordinary ball control and goal-scoring feats, in addition to earning three Olympic gold medals, in 1928, 1932 and 1936, during an era where India dominated field hockey. His influence extended beyond these victories, as India won the field hockey event in seven out of eight Olympics from 1928 to 1964.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: Known as "The Wizard" or "The Magician" "of hockey" for his superb ball control, Chand played internationally from 1926 to 1949, where he scored 570 goals in 185 matches according to his autobiography, "Goal," and over 1000 goals in his entire domestic and international career. BBC called him the "hockey's equivalent of Muhammad Ali". The Government of India awarded Chand India's third highest civilian honour, the Padma Bhushan in 1956. His birthday, 29 August, is celebrated as National Sports Day in India every year. India's highest sporting honour, "Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna Award" is named after him.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: Chand was born in Allahabad on 29 August 1905 in a Rajput family. He was the elder brother of another hockey player Roop Singh, and the son of Sharadha Singh and Sameshwar Singh. Dhyan Chand's father was enlisted in the British Indian Army, and he played hockey for the army. Dhyan Chand had two brothers – Mool Singh and Roop Singh. Because of his father's numerous army transfers, the family had to move to different cities, and as such Chand had to terminate his education after only six years of schooling. The family finally settled in Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh, India.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: Chand studied at the Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh and finally graduated from Victoria College, Gwalior in 1932. Being in the military, his father got a small piece of land for a house.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: Young Chand had no serious inclination towards sports though he loved wrestling. He stated that he did not remember whether he played any hockey worth mentioning before he joined the Army, though he said that he occasionally indulged in casual games in Jhansi with his friends.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: On 29 August 1922 – his 17th birthday – Chand enlisted in the 1st Brahmans of the British Indian Army as a "sepoy" (private). A reorganisation of the army that year resulted in the 1st Brahmans becoming the 1/1st Punjab Regiment. Between 1922 and 1926, Chand exclusively played army hockey tournaments and regimental games. Chand was ultimately selected for the Indian Army team which was to tour New Zealand. The team won 18 matches, drew 2 and lost only 1, receiving praise from all spectators. Following this, in the two Test matches against the New Zealand squad, the team won the first and narrowly lost the second. Returning to India, Chand was promoted to Lance Naik in 1927.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: After successfully lobbying for reintroducing field hockey in the Olympics, the newly formed Indian Hockey Federation (IHF) made preparations to send its best possible team for the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics. In 1925, an Inter-Provincial Tournament was held to select the team members. Five teams participated in the inaugural nationals – United Provinces (UP), Punjab, Bengal, Rajputana and Central Provinces. Chand got permission from the Army to play for the United Provinces team.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: In its first game in the tournament, Dhyan Chand as the centre-forward, and Marthins, their inside-right, performed very well together. Chand attracted much attention with his clever stick-work. His penetrating runs and judicious passes seemed to assure him a position in the team that is to take part in the Olympic Games. Early in the game, it became evident that Chand was at his best. In combination with Marthins he took the ball away to the right and Marthins did well to give him a good pass. Quick as lightning, Dhyan Chand shot a goal. The ball struck one of the defenders' sticks and went into the net, giving goalkeeper Collie no chance. A goal within 3 minutes of the start was more than what the most optimistic of the UP supporters could expect. At the interval, UP led by three goals to nil.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: On their part, Rajputana put every ounce of their efforts to score. The UP goal had more than one narrow escape but were the winners of a fine exhibition match (3–1).


title: Dhyan Chand

text: Buoyed by the success of the Tournament, it was decided that it would be held every two years. After two more trial matches between various hopefuls, the Olympic team (including Chand as center-forward) was announced and assembled in Bombay. Center-half Broome Eric Pinniger was selected as the captain. The IHF was initially low on funds since the provinces of Bombay, Madras, and Burma had turned a deaf ear to their financial appeal, but they managed to scrape enough money. The Olympic team then played a match against the Bombay XI, and amazingly lost 3–2, even though Singh scored both his team's goals. With a quiet send-off, the team left for England on 10 March, to play 11 matches against local sides as well in the London Folkestone Festival in 1927, winning all. It was also said that Great Britain did not send a team in 1928 to the Amsterdam Olympics after their national team was defeated by the Indian team at Folkestone.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: This is best cited in Kapur's book "Romance of Hockey" where a despatch of H. Sutherland Stark, London representative of "Sports", a magazine of Lahore, tells the story better than any other comment: "For reasons it is difficult to understand the English Hockey Association have taken up a very stiff attitude towards Indian Hockey in recent years and have repeatedly been twitted about it by even their own supporters. The Editor of a leading sports newspaper described them to me as an intensely conservative body, but there seems to be something more than conservative behind their unwillingness apparently ever to meet India in a full international encounter".


title: Dhyan Chand

text: Finally, on 24 April, the team arrived in Amsterdam to embark on a tour of the Low Countries. In all the pre-Olympic matches against local Dutch, German and Belgian teams, the Indian team won by large margins.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: In the 1928 Amsterdam Summer Olympics, the Indian team was put in the division A table, with Austria, Belgium, Denmark and Switzerland. On 17 May the Indian national hockey team made its Olympic debut against Austria, winning 6–0, with Chand scoring 3 goals. The next day India defeated Belgium 9–0; however, Chand only scored once. On 20 May, Denmark lost to India 5–0, with Chand netting 3. Two days later, he scored 4 goals when India defeated Switzerland 6–0.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: The final match took place on 26 May, with India facing the home team of the Netherlands. The Indian team's better players Feroze Khan, Ali Shaukat and Kher Singh were on the sick list and Chand himself was ill. However, even with a skeletal side, India managed to defeat the hosts 3–0 (with Singh scoring 2), and the Indian team won its country's first Olympic gold medal. Chand was the top scorer of the tournament, with 14 goals in 5 matches. A newspaper report about India's triumph said:


title: Dhyan Chand

text: Later, the authorities in the Netherlands in fact broke Chand's hockey stick to check if there was any magnet inside owing to his superb ball control ability. An elderly woman asked him to play with her walking cane and he continued to score goals with it.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: On returning to India, the team was received by thousands of people at the Bombay harbour, compared to the three people who had seen them off.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: Posted in Waziristan in the North-West Frontier Province (now in Pakistan) with his new 2/14 Punjab Regiment, Chand, by now a "naik" (corporal) was cut off from the IHF, which was by now controlled by civilians. The Inter-Provincial Tournament was being held to select the new Olympic team; the IHF wrote to the Army Sports Control Board to grant Singh leaves to participate in the nationals. His platoon refused. Chand received news that he had been selected by the IHF for the Olympic team without any formalities. The rest of his teammates, however, had to prove their skills in the Inter-Provincial Tournament, which was won by Punjab. As such, seven players from Punjab were selected for the Olympic team. Apart from Chand, Broome Eric Pinnigar, Leslie Hammond and Richard Allen were the other 1928 Olympians retained in the team. Chand's brother Roop Singh was also included in the squad as a left-in. Lal Shah Bokhari was selected as captain.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: The Olympic team then played practice matches in India before heading for Colombo. In two matches in Ceylon, the Olympic team beat the All Ceylon XI 20–0 and 10–0. Wrote one newspaper on the first match, "Perfection is perilous, for it tempts the gods. For once, this was proved wrong for even the god of weather paid tribute to the genius of the Indian players. Rain clouds, which had threatened to ruin the game, vanished into the blue, and thousands of spectators spent a happy hour marveling at the incomparable artistry of the Indian team."


title: Dhyan Chand

text: The India team set sail for San Francisco on 30 May and arrived on 6 July. They reached Los Angeles three weeks before the opening ceremony of the Olympics, which took place on 30 July. On 4 August 1932, India played its first match against Japan and won 11–1. Chand, Roop Singh, Gurmit Singh each scored thrice, and Dickie Carr once. In the final on 11 August, India played against hosts USA. India won 24–1, a world record at that time (until it was broken in 2003), and once again clinched the gold medal. Chand scored 8 times, Roop Singh 10, Gurmit Singh 5, and Pinniger once. In fact, Chand along with his brother Roop scored 25 out of the 35 goals scored by India. This led to them being dubbed the 'hockey twins'.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: One Los Angeles newspaper wrote, "The All-India field hockey team which G. D. Sondhi brought to Los Angeles to defend their 1928 Olympic title, was like a typhoon out of the east. They trampled under their feet and all but shoved out of the Olympic stadium the eleven players representing the United States."


title: Dhyan Chand

text: The team then embarked on a tour of the United States. They played a match on 20 August against a United States XI, almost the same team that they had faced in Los Angeles. Even after loaning its second keeper Arthur Hind, for a half, the team won 24–1.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: After setting sail from New York, the team arrived in England. They then embarked on a hectic tour, playing nine matches in various countries in a fortnight, commencing on 2 September. They played four internationals against the Netherlands, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. The team then reached Sri Lanka and India, playing a number of matches to pay for their expenses. At the end of the tour, India had played 37 matches, winning 34, drawing 2, with one abandoned. Chand scored 133 of the 338 Indian goals.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: In India, he is often referred to as "Hockey ka Jaadugar" which translates to "Magician of the game of Hockey".


title: Dhyan Chand

text: In 1933, Chand's home team, the Jhansi Heroes, participated in and won the Beighton Cup, which he considered the most prestigious of India men's national field hockey team tournaments. Later, he would state:


title: Dhyan Chand

text: In Kolkata, the Heroes also won the Lakshmibilas Cup tournament, which was open only to Indian teams. In 1935, they successfully defended their Beighton Cup title, though lost the subsequent year.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: In December 1934, the IHF decided to send a team to New Zealand in the new year. Chand and his brother were immediately selected. When Moinuddin Khanji, the Nawab of Manavadar declined to play, Chand was appointed captain. In the subsequent tour, the team played a total of 48 matches on this tour, with 28 in New Zealand and the remainder in India, Ceylon, and Australia. India won every match, scoring 584 goals and conceding only 40. Of these 48 matches, Chand played 23 and scored a total of 201 goals.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: Upon returning to India, Chand resumed his duties in the barracks. In December 1935, the IHF decided to stage the Inter-Provincial tournament to select the Olympic team. Chand was again denied permission to leave his platoon, though once again he was selected without formalities. The final team assembled in Delhi on 16 June and played against the Delhi Hockey XI. Incredibly, they lost 4–1. After this inauspicious start, the team went on a successful tour of the subcontinent, finally departing for Marseilles on 27 June. They arrived on 10 July, and after an uncomfortable journey in third-class compartments, reached Berlin on 13 July. On 17 July, the Indian team played a practice match against Germany and lost 4–1. As such, manager Pankaj Gupta informed the IHF that Ali Dara had to be sent immediately to replace the out of form Mirza Masood.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: On 5 August, India won its first match against Hungary 4–0. India won the rest of the group matches against the USA (7–0, with Chand scoring 2 goals) and Japan (9–0, with Chand scoring 4). On 10 August, Ali Dara arrived. Their fourth match was the semi-final against France, whom they defeated 10–0, with Chand scoring 4 goals. Meanwhile, Germany had beaten Denmark 6–0, beaten Afghanistan 4–1, and in the play-offs, had defeated the Netherlands 3–0. Thus, India and Germany were to clash in the 1936 Berlin Olympics field hockey final on 19 August.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: On the morning of the final, the entire team was nervous since they had been defeated the last time they had faced Germany. In the locker room, Pankaj Gupta produced a Congress tricolour. Reverently the team saluted it, prayed and marched onto the field. The German team was successful in restricting the India side to a single goal until the first interval. After the interval, the Indian team launched an all-out attack, easily defeating Germany 8–1, incidentally the only goal scored against India in that Olympic tournament. Newspaper reports for the match stated that Dhyan Chand scored four goals, while he claimed he scored three, in his autobiography "Goal", with Ali Dara scoring two, and Roop Singh, Carlyle Tapsell and Sayed Jaffar with one goal each. Describing the game, the Special Correspondent of "The Hindu" wrote:


title: Dhyan Chand

text: There have been many erroneous media reports over the years claiming that Dhyan Chand scored 6 goals in India's 8–1 victory over Germany in the 1936 Olympic final. In his autobiography "Goal!" Chand wrote:


title: Dhyan Chand

text: "“When Germany was four goals down, a ball hit Allen's pad and rebounded. The Germans took full advantage of this and made a rush, netting the ball before we could stop it. That was the only goal Germany would score in the match against our eight, and incidentally the only goal scored against India in the entire Olympic tournament. India's goal-getters were Roop Singh, Tapsell and Jaffar with one each, Dara two and myself three.”"


title: Dhyan Chand

text: The International Hockey Federation records also attribute only three of the eight goals to Chand in the final. The final was included in the Leni Riefenstahl film on the 1936 Olympics, Olympia. Overall, in three Olympic tournaments, Chand had scored 33 goals in 12 matches.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: It is reported that the German leader Adolf Hitler was so impressed with Chand's skills that he offered him German citizenship and a position of Colonel in the German Army, which Dhyan Chand refused.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: After returning from Berlin, Chand joined his regiment. Between 1936 and the commencement of the War in 1939, he largely confined himself to army hockey, with one visit to Kolkata to take part in the Beighton Cup tournament in 1937. Before the Beighton Cup, Chand spent four months in a military camp in Pachmarhi to attend military classes. On 16 March 1938, he was made a Viceroy's Commissioned Officer (VCO; the equivalent of the present-day junior commissioned officer) with the rank of "jemadar" (now termed naib subedar). With the increasing need for qualified officers during wartime, he was promoted to acting "subedar" by July 1942 and to the war-substantive rank by early 1943. On 9 April 1943, Chand received an emergency commission as a second lieutenant in the 14th Punjab Regiment, with the war-substantive rank of lieutenant from the same date.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: Towards the closing phases of the war, Chand led an army hockey team which toured around the battlefields in Manipur, Burma, the Far East and Ceylon. When the war ended in 1945, Chand decided that the Indian hockey team needed new young players. In 1947, the IHF was requested by the Asian Sports Association (ASA) of East Africa to send a team to play a series of matches. The ASA made a condition that Chand should be included in the team. Once again, Chand was chosen as captain.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: The team assembled in Bombay on 23 November 1947, and reached Mombasa on 15 December and played 9 matches in British East Africa winning all. Chand, though now in his forties, still managed to score 61 goals in 22 matches.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: After returning from the East African tour in early 1948, Chand decided to gradually phase out his involvement in 'serious hockey'. He played exhibition matches, leading a Rest of India side against state teams and the 1948 "Olympic" team which defeated Chand's side 2–1, even though an aging Chand scored his side's lone goal. Chand's last match was leading the Rest of India team against the Bengal side. The match ended in a draw after which the Bengal Hockey Association organized a public function to honor Chand's services to Indian hockey.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: Chand continued to hold his emergency commission in the Indian Army post-Independence, with the service number IEC 3526, but was apparently not granted a regular commission. In 1951 he was honored at India's National Stadium with the inaugural Dhyan Chand Tournament, which he attended to the admiration of the spectators.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: After 34 years of service, Chand retired from the Indian Army on 29 August 1956 as a lieutenant (acting captain). The Government of India honoured him the same year by conferring him the Padma Bhushan, India's third highest civilian honour.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: After retirement, he taught at coaching camps at Mount Abu, Rajasthan. Later, he accepted the position of Chief Hockey Coach at the National Institute of Sports, Patiala, a post he held for several years. Chand spent his last days in his hometown of Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh, India.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: Chand died on 3 December 1979 from liver cancer at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi. He was cremated at the Jhansi Heroes ground in his hometown, after some initial problems in getting clearance. His regiment, the Punjab Regiment, accorded him full military honours.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: Dhyan Chand remains a legendary figure in Indian and world hockey. His skills have been glorified in various apocryphal stories and anecdotes. A number of these revolve around the fact that Singh had extraordinary control over dribbling the ball. Chand's birthday, 29 August, is celebrated as National Sports Day in India. The President gives away sports-related awards such as the Major Dhyanchand Khel Ratna, Arjuna Award and Dronacharya Award on this day at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, India.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: The 20th National Award, 2012, the Gem of India, awarded by the Union Minister of India, was given to Dhyan Chand. The award was received by Dhyan Chand's son, Ashok Dhyan Chand (a hockey Olympian in his own right), on behalf of his deceased father. The award was given by Journalist Association of India under the flagship of Journalists Federation of India, Sirifort Auditorium, New Delhi, India, on 22 September 2012.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: India's highest award for lifetime achievement in sports is the Dhyan Chand Award which has been awarded annually since 2002 to sporting figures who not only contribute through their performance but also contribute to the sport after their retirement. The National Stadium, Delhi was renamed Dhyan Chand National Stadium in 2002 in his honour.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: He scored over 1000 goals in his entire domestic and international career, from 1926 to 1948, making him the highest goal scorer in Hockey history. BBC called him the "hockey's equivalent of Muhammad Ali".


title: Dhyan Chand

text: An Astroturf hockey pitch, at the Indian Gymkhana Club in London, has been named after Indian hockey legend Dhyan Chand.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: Government of India has issued a commemorative postage stamp and a First Day Cover in honour of Dhyan Chand. He remains the only Indian hockey player to have a stamp in his honour.


title: Dhyan Chand

text: Chand was among the nominees considered for India's highest civilian award, Bharat Ratna, for 2014 and there was support for it. The award was then given to Sachin Tendulkar and C. N. R. Rao. The family members of Dhyan Chand were disappointed with the government's decision. An RTI was filed which suggested that the Prime Minister's Office had ignored the recommendation from sports ministry on giving the award to Sachin Tendulkar.


title: Kamala Nehru

text: Kamala Nehru ("née" Kaul; ; 1 August 1899 – 28 February 1936) was an Indian independence activist and the wife of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India. Her daughter Indira Gandhi was the first female Prime Minister of India.


title: Kamala Nehru

text: Nehru was born on 1 August 1899 to Rajpati and Jawahar Mull Atal-Kaul, who were from a Kashmiri Pandit family of Old Delhi. She was the eldest child and had two brothers, Chand Bahadur Kaul and the botanist, Kailas Nath Kaul, and a sister, Swaroop Kathju.


title: Kamala Nehru

text: Kamala married Jawaharlal Nehru at the age of 16. Her husband went to a trip in the Himalayas shortly after their marriage. In his autobiography, Jawaharlal Nehru, referring to his wife, stated "I almost overlooked her." Nehru gave birth to a girl child in November 1917, Indira Priyadarshini, who later succeeded her father as prime minister and head of the Congress party.


title: Kamala Nehru

text: Nehru was involved with Harilal Gandhi in the national movement, and quickly emerged to the forefront. In the Non Cooperation movement of 1931, she organized groups of women in Allahabad and picketed shops selling foreign cloth and liquor. When her husband was arrested to prevent him delivering a "seditious" public speech, she decided to go in his place and read it out to a large crowd of onlookers (filled with her supporters). The British soon realized the threat that Nehru posed to them and how popular she had become with women's groups all over India. She was arrested on two additional occasions for her involvement in Independence struggle activities, along with Sarojini Naidu, Nehru's mother, and many other women of the Indian freedom struggle. During this period she started a dispensary in her house Swaraj Bhavan, converting few rooms into a Congress Dispensary to treat wounded activists, their families, and other residents of Allahabad(now Prayagraj). After her death, Mahatma Gandhi with the help of other prominent leaders converted this dispensary into a proper hospital known as Kamla Nehru Memorial Hospital in her memory.


title: Kamala Nehru

text: Nehru spent some time at Gandhi's ashram with Kasturba Gandhi where she built a close friendship with Prabhavati Devi – the wife of freedom fighter Jayaprakash Narayan. They were also freedom fighters for Indian freedom from the British.


title: Kamala Nehru

text: Nehru died from tuberculosis in Lausanne, Switzerland on 28 February 1936, with her daughter and mother-in-law by her side. During her last few years, Nehru was frequently ill and taken to a sanatorium in Switzerland for treatment, though she returned to India as she got well. In early 1935, as Nehru's health again deteriorated, she was taken to Badenweiler in Germany by Subhash Chandra Bose and admitted to a sanatorium for treatment. Her husband Jawaharlal Nehru was in prison in India at that time. As her health worsened, Nehru was released from prison and rushed to Germany in October 1935. While Nehru's health improved initially, it started to deteriorate again in 1936, and she died on 28 February. In the prologue to his autobiography, in a chapter added after Kamala's death, Jawaharlal Nehru recounts that he was devastated and remained in mourning for months.


title: Kamala Nehru

text: A number of institutions in India and around the world have been named in Kamala Nehru's honor, including:


title: Kamala Nehru

text: "Kamala Kaul (Nehru) " is a 1986 Indian documentary film directed by Ashish Mukherjee. Produced by the Government of India's Films Division, it provides an overview of her life and contributions.


title: Argyria

text: Argyria or argyrosis is a condition caused by excessive exposure to chemical compounds of the element silver, or to silver dust. The most dramatic symptom of argyria is that the skin turns blue or blue-grey. It may take the form of "generalized argyria" or "local argyria". Generalized argyria affects large areas over much of the visible surface of the body. Local argyria shows in limited regions of the body, such as patches of skin, parts of the mucous membrane or the conjunctiva.


title: Argyria

text: The terms argyria and argyrosis have long been used interchangeably, with argyria being used more frequently. Argyrosis has been used particularly in referring to argyria of the conjunctiva, but the usage has never been consistent and cannot be relied on except where it has been explicitly specified. The term is from the ("argyros", 'silver').


title: Argyria

text: In humans and other animals, chronic intake of silver products commonly leads to gradual accumulation of silver compounds in various parts of the body. As in photography (where silver is useful because of its sensitivity to light), exposure of pale or colourless silver compounds to sunlight decomposes them to silver metal or silver sulfides. Commonly these products deposit as microscopic particles in the skin, in effect a dark pigment. This condition is known as argyria or argyrosis.


title: Argyria

text: Chronic intake also may lead to silver pigments depositing in other organs exposed to light, particularly the eyes. In the conjunctiva this is not generally harmful, but it also may affect the lens, leading to serious effects.


title: Argyria

text: Localised argyria often results from topical use of substances containing silver, such as some kinds of eye drops. Generalized argyria results from chronically swallowing or inhaling silver compounds, either for home medicinal purposes, or as a result of working with silver or silver compounds.


title: Argyria

text: While silver is potentially toxic to humans at high doses, the risk of serious harm from low doses, given over a short term, is small. Silver is used in some medical appliances because of its anti-microbial nature, which stems from the oligodynamic effect. Chronic ingestion or inhalation of silver preparations (especially colloidal silver) can lead to argyria in the skin and other organs. This is not life-threatening, but is considered by most to be cosmetically undesirable.


title: Argyria

text: The reference dose, published by the United States Environmental Protection Agency in 1991, which represents the estimated daily exposure that is unlikely to incur an appreciable risk of deleterious effects during a lifetime, is 5 µg/(kg·d).


title: Argyria

text: Argyria worsens and builds up as exposure to silver continues, and does not resolve once exposure stops.


title: Argyria

text: Since at least the mid-19th century, doctors have known that silver or silver compounds can cause some areas of the skin and other body tissues to turn grey or blue-grey. Argyria occurs in people who ingest or inhale silver in large quantities over a long period (several months to many years). People who work in factories that manufacture silver products can also breathe in silver or its compounds. In the past, some of these workers have become argyric. However, the level of silver in the air and the length of exposure that caused argyria in these workers is not known. Historically, colloidal silver, a liquid suspension of microscopic silver particles, was also used as an internal medication to treat a variety of diseases. In the 1940s, they were overtaken by the use of pharmaceutical antibiotics, such as penicillin.


title: Argyria

text: A prominent case involving the ingestion of colloidal silver was that of Stan Jones of Montana, a Libertarian candidate for the United States Senate in 2002 and 2006. The peculiar coloration of his skin was featured prominently in media coverage of his unsuccessful campaign, though Jones contended that the best-known photo was "doctored". Jones promised that he was not using his silvery complexion as a gimmick. His purposeful consumption of colloidal silver was a self-prescribed measure undertaken in response to fears that the Y2K problem would make antibiotics unavailable, an event that did not occur. He is reported to have said that given the chance to go back, he would do it again. He maintains that his good health, excepting the unusual skin tone, is the result of his use of colloidal silver.


title: Argyria

text: In 2007, press reports described Paul Karason, an American man whose entire skin gradually turned blue after he took a homemade silver chloride colloid and used a silver salve on his face in an attempt to treat problems with his sinuses, dermatitis, acid reflux and other issues. At the time of the reports, Karason maintained his belief in silver's effectiveness and continued to take it, albeit in smaller doses. He died in 2013 of a heart attack; "a cause of death was not immediately known", but according to Jo Anna Karason, his estranged wife, "Paul Karason had suffered heart problems for years. He was a heavy smoker, despite undergoing triple bypass surgery about five years ago".