Surrealist women's writing

A critical exploration

Anna Watz

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781526132024
• eBook ISBN: 9781526132048
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Surrealist women's writing: A critical exploration is the first sustained critical inquiry into the writing of women associated with surrealism. Featuring original essays by leading scholars of surrealism, the volume demonstrates the extent and the historical, linguistic, and culturally contextual breadth of this writing. It also highlights how the specifically surrealist poetics and politics of these writers' work intersect with and contribute to contemporary debates on, for example, gender, sexuality, subjectivity, otherness, anthropocentrism, and the environment. Drawing on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, the essays in the volume focus on the writing of numerous women surrealists, many of whom have hitherto mainly been known for their visual rather than their literary production. These include Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Kay Sage, Colette Peignot, Suzanne Césaire, Unica Zürn, Ithell Colquhoun, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, and Rikki Ducornet.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘The dung beetle’s snowball’: the philosophic narcissism of Claude Cahun’s essay-poetry
• 2 Identity convulsed: Leonora Carrington’s The House of Fear and The Oval Lady
• 3 Recasting the human: Leonora Carrington’s dark exilic imagination
• 4 Colette Peignot: the purity of revolt
• 5 Suzanne Césaire’s surrealism: tightrope of hope1
• 6 Kay Sage alive in the world
• 7 Outside-in: translating Unica Zürn
• 8 Ithell Colquhoun’s experimental poetry: surrealism, occultism, and postwar poetry
• 9 Leonor Fini’s abhuman family
• 10 ‘Open sesame’: Dorothea Tanning’s critical writing
• 11 Magic language, esoteric nature: Rikki Ducornet’s surrealist ecology
• Index