Surrealism and the Exotic is the story of the obsessive relationship between surrealist and non-western culture. Describing the travels across Africa, Oceania, Mexico and the Caribbean made by wealthy aesthetes, it combines an insight into the mentality of early twentieth century collectors with an overview of the artistic heritage at stake in these adventures. Featuring more than 70 photographs of artefacts, exhibitions and expeditions-in-progress, it brings to life the climate of hedonism enjoyed by Breton, Ernst, Durkheim, and Mauss, It is an unparalleled introduction to the Surrealist movement and to French thought and culture in the 1920s and 1930s.

A moving and spectacular tale of love, jealousy, and exotic travel, centering on three significant figures in the surrealist movement. This book describes the secret journey made by an extraordinary ménage à trois: the painter Max Ernst, Paul Eluard (cofounder of surrealism with André Breton), and Eluard's wife Gala. The author unravels the story of Ernst's love affair with Gala, Eluard's disappearance, Ernst and Gala's pursuit of him, their meeting in Saigon where the love triangle came apart, and the resulting departure of the Eluards, who left Ernst to explore the jungles of French Indochina alone. The impact on the work of both men was profound. As for Gala, she eventually dropped both her lovers for Salvador Dali.

A vital new interpretation of the personalities, historical forces and intellectual paradigms that created Surrealist art

Vivienne Brough-Evans proposes a compelling new way of reevaluating aspects of international surrealism by means of the category of divin fou, and consequently deploys theories of sacred ecstasy as developed by the Collège de Sociologie (1937–39) as a critical tool in shedding new light on the literary oeuvre of non-French writers who worked both within and against a surrealist framework. The minor surrealist genre of prose literature is considered herein, rather than surrealism's mainstay, poetry, with the intention of fracturing preconceptions regarding the medium of surrealist expression. The aim is to explore whether International surrealism can begin to be more fully explained by an occluded strain of 'dissident' surrealist thought that searches outside the self through the affects of ekstasis. Bretonian surrealism is widely discussed in the field of surrealist studies, and there is a need to consider what is left out of surrealist practice when analysed through this Bretonian lens. The Collège de Sociologie and Georges Bataille's theories provide a model of such elements of 'dissident' surrealism, which is used to analyse surrealist or surrealist influenced prose by Alejo Carpentier, Leonora Carrington and Gellu Naum respectively representing postcolonial, feminist and Balkan locutions. The Collège and Bataille's 'dissident' surrealism diverges significantly from the concerns and approach towards the subject explored by surrealism. Using the concept of ekstasis to organise Bataille's theoretical ideas of excess and 'inner experience' and the Collège's thoughts on the sacred it is possible to propose a new way of reading types of International surrealist literature, many of which do not come to the forefront of the surrealist literary oeuvre.

Often regarded as an artistic movement of interwar Paris, Surrealism comprised an international community of artists, writers, and intellectuals who have aspired to change the conditions of life itself over the course of the past century. Consisting of a wide range of dedicated case studies from the 1920s to the 1970s, this book highlights the international dimensions of the Surrealist Movement, and the radical chains of thought that linked its followers across the globe: from France to Romania, and from Canada to the former Czechoslovakia. From very early on, the surrealists approached magic as a means of bypassing, discrediting, and combatting rationalism, capitalism, and other institutionalized systems and values that they saw to be constraining influences upon modern life. Surrealist Sorcery maps out how this interest in magic developed into a major area of surrealist research that led not only to theoretical but also practical explorations of the subject. Taking an international perspective, Atkin surveys this important quality of the movement and how it's remained an important element in the surrealist project and its ongoing legacy.

Charting surrealism in Latin American literature from its initial appearance in Argentina in 1928 to the surrealist-inspired work of several writers in the 1970s, Melanie Nicholson argues that surrealism has exercised a significant and positive influence over twentieth-century Latin American literature, particularly poetry.

This important book not only examines changing notions of nationhood and their complicated relationship to the Nazi past but also charts the wider history of the development of German political thought since World War II, while critically reflecting on some of the continuing blind spots among German writers and thinkers.

The Companion to Magical Realism provides an assessment of the world-wide impact of a movement which was incubated in Germany, flourished in Latin America and then spread to the rest of the world. It provides a set of up-to-date assessments of the work of writers traditionally associated with magical realism such as Gabriel Garc a M rquez in particular his recently published memoirs], Alejo Carpentier, Miguel ngel Asturias, Juan Rulfo, Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel and Salman Rushdie, as well as bringing into the fold new authors such as W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Jos Saramago, Dorit Rabinyan, Ovid, Mar a Luisa Bombal, Ibrahim al-Kawni, Mayra Montero, Nakagami Kenji, Jos Eustasio Rivera and Elias Khoury, discussed for the first time in the context of magical realism. Written in a jargon-free style, and with all quotations translated into English, this book offers a refreshing new interdisciplinary slant on magical realism as an international literary phenomenon emerging from the trauma of colonial dispossession. The companion also has a Guide to Further Reading. Stephen Hart is Professor of Hispanic Studies, University College London and Doctor Honoris Causa of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima, Peru. Wen-chin Ouyang lectures in Arabic Literature and Comparative Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. CONTRIBUTORS: Jonathan Allison, Michael Berkowitz, John D. Erickson, Robin Fiddian, Evelyn Fishburn, Stephen M. Hart, David Henn, Stephanie Jones, Julia King, Efra n Kristal, Mark Morris, Humberto N ez-Faraco, Wen-Chin Ouyang, Lois Parkinson Zamora, Helene Price, Tsila A. Ratner, Kenneth Reeds, Alejandra Rengifo, Lorna Robinson, Sarah Sceats, Donald L. Shaw, Stefan Sperl, Philip Swanson, Jason Wilson.

Examining the surrealist novels of several contemporary writers including Edwidge Danticat, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Junot Díaz, Helen Oyeyemi, and Colson Whitehead, AfroSurrealism, the first book-length exploration of AfroSurreal fiction, argues that we have entered a new and exciting era of the black novel, one that is more invested than ever before in the cross sections of science, technology, history, folklore, and myth. Building on traditional surrealist scholarship and black studies criticism, the author contends that as technology has become ubiquitous, the ways in which writers write has changed; writers are producing more surrealist texts to represent the psychological challenges that have arisen during an era of rapid social and technological transitions. For black writers, this has meant not only a return to Surrealism, but also a complete restructuring in the way that both past and present are conceived, as technology, rather than being a means for demeaning and brutalizing a black labor force, has become an empowering means of sharing information. Presenting analyses of contemporary AfroSurreal fiction, this volume examines the ways in which contemporary writers grapple with the psychology underlying this futuristic technology, presenting a cautiously optimistic view of the future, together with a hope for better understanding of the past. As such, it will appeal to scholars of cultural, media and literary studies with interests in the contemporary novel, Surrealism, and black fiction.

The first monograph to analyze the Surrealist gesture of photographic appropriation, this study examines "found" photographs in three French Surrealist reviews published in the 1920s and 1930s: La R?lution surr?iste, edited by Andr?reton; Documents, edited by Georges Bataille; and Minotaure, edited by Breton and others. The book asks general questions about the production and deployment of meaning through photographs, but addresses more specifically the construction of a Surrealist practice of photography through the gesture of borrowing and re-contextualization and reveals something crucial both about Surrealist strategies and about the way photographs operate. The book is structured around four case studies, including scientific photographs of an hysteric in Charcot's clinic at the Salp?i? hospital, positioned as poetry rather than pathology; and one of the first crime-scene photographs, depicting Jack the Ripper's last victim, radically transformed into a work of art. Linda Steer traces the trajectory of the found photographs, from their first location to their location in a Surrealist periodical. Her study shows that the act of removal and re-framing highlights the instability and mutability of photographic meaning an instability and mutability that has consequences for our understanding both of photography and of Surrealism in the 1920s and 1930s.