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.

Now available in a single volume paperback, this advanced reference resource for the novel and novel theory offers authoritative accounts of the history, terminology, and genre of the novel, in over 140 articles of 500-7,000 words. Entries explore the history and tradition of the novel in different areas of the world; formal elements of the novel (story, plot, character, narrator); technical aspects of the genre (such as realism, narrative structure and style); subgenres, including the bildungsroman and the graphic novel; theoretical problems, such as definitions of the novel; book history; and the novel's relationship to other arts and disciplines. The Encyclopedia is arranged in A-Z format and features entries from an international cast of over 140 scholars, overseen by an advisory board of 37 leading specialists in the field, making this the most authoritative reference resource available on the novel. This essential reference, now available in an easy-to-use, fully indexed single volume paperback, will be a vital addition to the libraries of literature students and scholars everywhere.

This book examines the salient ideas and practices that have shaped Surrealism as a protean intellectual and cultural concept that fundamentally shifted our understanding of the nexus between art, culture, and politics. By bringing a diverse set of artistic forms and practices such as literature, manifestos, collage, photography, film, fashion, display, and collecting into conversation with newly emerging intellectual traditions (ethnography, modern science, anthropology, and psychoanalysis), the essays in this volume reveal Surrealism's enduring influence on contemporary thought and culture alongside its anti-colonial political position and international reach. Surrealism's fascination with novel forms of cultural production and experimental methods contributed to its conceptual malleability and temporal durability, making it one of the most significant avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. The book traces how Surrealism's urgent political and aesthetic provocations have bequeathed an important legacy for recent scholarly interest in thing theory, critical vitalism, new materialism, ontology, and animal/human studies.

A History of the Spanish Novel is the only volume in English that offers comprehensive coverage of the history of the Spanish novel, from the sixteenth century to the present day, with chapters written by some of the world-leading experts in the field.

This edited collection approaches the most pressing discourses of the Anthropocene and posthumanist culture through the surreal, yet instructive lens of Jeff VanderMeer’s fiction. In contrast to universalist and essentializing ways of responding to new material realities, VanderMeer’s work invites us to re-imagine human subjectivity and other collectivities in the light of historically unique entanglements we face today: the ecological, technological, aesthetic, epistemological, and political challenges of life in the Anthropocene era. Situating these messy, multi-scalar, material complexities of life in close relation to their ecological, material, and colonialist histories, his fiction renders them at once troublingly familiar and strangely generative of other potentialities and insight. The collection measures VanderMeer’s work as a new kind of speculative surrealism, his texts capturing the strangeness of navigating a world in which "nature" has become radically uncanny due to global climate change and powerful bio-technologies. The first collection to survey academic engagements with VanderMeer, this book brings together scholars in the fields of environmental literature, science fiction, genre studies, American literary history, philosophy of technology, and digital cultures to reflect on the environmentally, culturally, aesthetically, and politically central questions his fiction poses to predominant understandings of the Anthropocene.

Despite surrealism's celebration of the subconscious and eschewal of reason, the movement was nevertheless concerned with definitions. Andre Breton included a dictionary-style entry for surrealisme in his 1924 Manifeste du surrealisme and later explored juxtapositions of the absurd and the mundane in the 1938 Dictionnaire abrege du surrealisme. To the mountain of literature that seeks to organize the far-reaching intellectual movement, Aspley (honorary fellow, Univ. of Edinburgh) adds this handy volume that organizes the breadth of surrealism into concise entries on artists, writers, artworks, and themes. A chronology highlights events that sparked the surrealist imagination, activities of formal surrealist groups, and exhibitions. An introductory essay and extensive bibliography are included. One of the few English-language reference sources about surrealism published in the last decade, Aspley's dictionary is useful for quick access to key terms and biographies. For a book devoted to a movement characterized by arresting visual imagery, the lack of illustrations is annoying. Even Rene Passeron's 1978 Phaidon Encyclopedia of Surrealism (CH, May'79) reprints artworks in color. For a richly illustrated and comprehensive history, see Gerard Durozi's History of the Surrealist Movement (CH, Nov'02, 40-1316). Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-level undergraduates through graduate students. Lower-division Undergraduates; Upper-division Undergraduates; Graduate Students. Reviewed by A. H. Simmons.

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.