The great surrealist's collage masterpiece was printed in 1934 in a limited edition of five now-priceless pamphlets. This single-volume edition contains all of the original publication's 182 bizarre, darkly humorous scenes of violent dreams and erotic fantasies. "One of the clandestine classics of our century." — The New York Times.

Art and Language: Explorations in (Post) Modern Thought and Visual Culture sheds new light on the symbiotic relationship between art and language by exploring how these cultured sets consociate on philosophical and art-historical levels. Against the backdrop of (visual) semiotics the first section of the book considers the differences between art and language from various vantage points: meaning-making, asking if art is a language, Ernst Cassirer's symbolic forms, Jan Muka?ovský's signs, and Gilles Deleuze's philosophy. The second section of the book deals with the works of (post) modern artists from diverse cultural backgrounds who unfasten traditional linguistic and artistic systems by destabilising the viewer and blurring the boundaries between art and language. The author argues that this is the most productive, cutting-edge aspect of the word-image relationship of that period. Language provides (post) modern art with its thrust and focus and offers a site for critical intervention. The artistic forays the author embarks on cover a wide range touching on Surrealism, Dada, Arabic Calligraphy, and Chinese Conceptualist Art.

A History of the Surrealist Novel offers a rich, long, and elastic historiography of the surrealist novel, taking into consideration an abundance of texts previously left out of critical accounts. Its twenty thematically organized chapters examine surrealist prose texts written in French, English, Spanish, German, Greek, and Japanese, from the emergence of the surrealist movement in the 1920s and 1930s, through the post-war and postmodern periods, and up to the contemporary moment. This approach extends received narratives regarding surrealism's geographical locations and considers its transnational movement and modes of circulation. Moreover, it challenges critical biases that have defined surrealism in predominantly masculine terms, and which tie the movement to the interwar or early post-war years. This book will appeal both to scholars and students of surrealism and its legacies, modernist literature, and the history of the novel.

The rise of digital publishing and the ebook has opened up an array of possibilities for the writer working with innovation in mind. Creative Writing and the Radical uses an examination of how experimental writers in the past have explored the possibilities of multimodal writing to theorise the nature of writing fiction in the future. It is clear that experimental writers rehearsed for technological advances long before they were invented. Through an in-depth study of writers and their motivations, challenges and solutions, the author explores the shifts creative writing teachers and students will need to make in order to adapt to a new era of fiction writing and reading.

This book deals with the early intellectual reception of the cinema and the manner in which art theorists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and especially artists of the first decades of the twentieth century responded to its advent. While the idea persists that early writers on film were troubled by the cinema’s lowly form, this work proposes that there was another, largely unrecognized, strain in the reception of it. Far from anxious about film’s provenance in popular entertainment, some writers and artists proclaimed that the cinema was the most important art for the moderns, as it exemplified the vibrancy of contemporary life. This view of the cinema was especially common among those whose commitments were to advanced artistic practices. Their notions about how to recast the art media (or the forms forged from those media’s materials) and the urgency of doing so formed the principal part of the conceptual core of the artistic programs advanced by the vanguard art movements of the first half of the twentieth century. This book, a companion to the author’s previous, Harmony & Dissent, examines the Dada and Surrealist movements as responses to the advent of the cinema.

This book uses intermedial theories to study collage and montage, tracing the transformation of visual collage into photomontage in the early avant-garde period. Magda Dragu distinguishes between the concepts of collage and montage, as defined across several media (fine arts, literature, music, film, photography), based on the type of artistic meaning they generate, rather than the mechanical procedures involved. The book applies theories of intermediality to collage and montage, which is crucial for understanding collage as a form of cultural production. Throughout, the author considers the political implications, as collages and montages were often used for propagandistic purposes. This book combines research methods used in several areas of inquiry: art history, literary criticism, analytical philosophy, musicology, and aesthetics.