Two Surrealist Manifestos were issued by the Surrealist movement, in 1924 and 1929. They were both written by Andr� Breton. Andr� Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above all, a revolutionary movement. The first Surrealist manifesto was written by Breton and published in 1924 as a booklet (Editions du Sagittaire). The document defines Surrealism as:"Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern." Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its visual artworks and writings. The aim was to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality". Artists painted unnerving, illogical scenes with photographic precision, created strange creatures from everyday objects and developed painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself.

A collection of both of the Manifestoes of Surrealism written by Andre Breton in 1924 and 1929. The pocket book size to make the two manifestoes more accessible in print without being part of some collected works.

The Surrealist Movement is an international intellectual movement that has led a sustained questioning of the basis of human experience under twentieth- and twenty-first century modernity since its founding in the early 1920s. Influenced by the psychoanalytical teachings of Sigmund Freud, Surrealism emerged among the generation that had witnessed the insanity and horror of the First World War, and was conceived of as a framework for investigating the little-understood phenomena of dreams and the unconscious. In these territories the surrealists recognized an alternative axis of human experience that did not align with the rational, workaday rhythms of modern life, and which instead revealed the extent to which individual subjectivity had been constrained by post-Enlightenment rationalism and by the economic forces governing the post-industrial world. Against these trends, the Surrealist Movement has sought to re-evaluate the foundations of modern society and reassert the primacy of the imagination for almost a century to-date. This book offers focused introductions to numerous writers, poets, artists, filmmakers, precursors, groups, movements, events, concepts, cultures, nations and publications connected to Surrealism, providing orientation for students and casual readers alike. Historical Dictionary of Surrealism, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 200 cross-referenced entries on the Surrealist Movement’s engagement with the realms of politics, philosophy, science, poetry, art and cinema, and charts the international surrealist community’s diverse explorations of specific thematic territories such as magic, occultism, mythology, eroticism and gothicism. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about surrealism.

"Nadja, " originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's attitude toward everyday life. The principal narrative is an account of the author's relationship with a girl in teh city of Paris, the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life. The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work -- pictures of various "surreal" people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in naja's presence and which inspire him to mediate on their reality or lack of it. "The Nadja of the book is a girl, but, like Bertrand Russell's definition of electricity as "not so much a thing as a way things happen, " Nadja is not so much a person as the way she makes people behave. She has been described as a state of mind, a feeling about reality, k a kind of vision, and the reader sometimes wonders whether she exists at all. yet it is Nadja who gives form and structure to the novel.

This study proposes that there has been a revival of surrealist poetry, and traces an uninterrupted thread of development in surrealism throughout 20th-century English poetry.

André Breton (1896-1966) was the founder and major theorist of the surrealist movement, one of the most vital currents of modern poetry and revolutionary thought. This compilation of Breton's writings gives a compact survey of his views and the perspectives of international surrealism as they have developed through more than half a century, and as they serve to guide the groups and individuals who, in dozens of centuries, have taken up the surrealist cause. About half of the selections are published here in English for the first time; others are reprinted from scarce, out-of-print periodicals. The editor, Franklin Rosemont, met Breton in 1966, and later that year organised the first indigenous US surrealist group. He is the author of two books of poems and the Manifesto on the Position & Direction of the Surrealist Movement in the United States (1970). He played a major role in organising the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition in Chicago, by far the largest exhibition ever prepared by the surrealists. He lives in Chicago where he edits Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion, English-language journal of the international surrealist movement.