Surrealism and the Gothic is the first book-length analysis of the role played by the gothic in both the initial emergence of surrealism and at key moments in its subsequent development as an art and literary movement. The book argues the strong and sustained influence, not only of the classic gothic novel itself - Ann Radcliffe, Charles Maturin, Matthew Lewis, etc. - but also the determinative impact of closely related phenomena, as with the influence of mediumism, alchemy and magic. The book also traces the later development of the gothic novel, as with Bram Stoker's...

In A Surrealist Stratigraphy of Dorothea Tanning s Chasm, Catriona McAra offers the first critical study of the literary work of the celebrated American painter and sculptor Dorothea Tanning (1910 2012). McAra fills a major gap in the scholarship, repositioning Tanning s writing at the centre of her entire creative oeuvre and focusing on a little-known short story "Abyss," a gothic-flavoured, desert adventure which Tanning worked on intermittently throughout her creative life, finally publishing it in 2004 as Chasm: A Weekend.

McAra performs a major...

The Animal Surreal situates Surrealism within the burgeoning field of Animal Studies by examining Surrealist representations of nonhuman animals through the lens of Darwinian theory. Unlike Marx and Freud, Darwin was rarely cited by name as a source for the Surrealists, and yet his influence is present in various ways, such as the frequent inclusion of -natural history- imagery and the exploration of themes of mutability and mutation. Animals and our relationship to them furthermore constitute a significant source of inquiry for Surrealism, as evidenced by Max Ernst's human-bird alter-ego...

Replication and originality are central concepts in the artistic oeuvres of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. Remaking the Readymade reveals the underlying and previously unexplored processes and rationales for the collaboration between Duchamp, Man Ray, and Arturo Schwarz on the replication of readymades and objects.

The 1964 editioned replicas of the readymades sent shock waves through the art world. Even though the replicas undermined ideas of authorship and problematized the notion of identity and the artist, they paradoxically shared in the aura of the originals,...

Following the journey of the leader of the Surrealist movement, Andre Breton, into exile during the Second World War, the author of this book traces the trajectory of his thought and poetic output of 1941-1948. Through a close examination of the major - and as yet little studied - works written during these years, she demonstrates how Breton's quest for 'a new myth' for the post-war world led him to widen his enquiry into hermeticism, myth and the occult. This ground-breaking study establishes Breton's profound intellectual debt to 19th century Romanticism, its literature and thought,...