In the decades between the two World Wars, Greek writers and artists adopted surrealism both as an avant-garde means of overturning the stifling traditions of their classical heritage and also as a way of responding to the extremely unstable political situation in their country. Despite producing much first-rate work throughout the rest of the twentieth century, Greek surrealists have not been widely read outside of Greece. This volume seeks to remedy that omission by offering authoritative translations of the major works of the most important Greek surrealist writers. Nikos Stabakis groups the Greek surrealists into three generations: the founders (such as Andreas Embirikos, Nikos Engonopoulos, and Nicolas Calas), the second generation, and the Pali Group, which formed around the magazine Pali. For each generation, he provides a very helpful introduction to the themes and concerns that animate their work, as well as concise biographies of each writer. Stabakis anthologizes translations of all the key surrealist works of each generation—poetry, prose, letters, and other documents—as well as a selection of rarer texts. His introduction to the volume places Greek surrealism within the context of the international movement, showing how Greek writers and artists used surrealism to express their own cultural and political realities.

This book provides a conceptual and global overview of the field of Surrealist studies. Methodologically, the companion considers Surrealism’s many achievements, but also its historical shortcomings, to illuminate its connections to the historical and cultural moment(s) from which it originated and to assess both the ways in which it still shapes our world in inspiring ways and the ways in which it might appear problematic as we look back at it from a twenty-first-century vantage point. Contributions from experienced scholars will enable professors to teach the subject more broadly, by opening their eyes to aspects of the field that are on the margins of their expertise, and it will enable scholars to identify new areas of study in their own work, by indicating lines of research at a tangent to their own. The companion will reflect the interdisciplinarity of Surrealism by incorporating discussions pertaining to the visual arts, as well as literature, film, and political and intellectual history.

Engaging with the work of Nobel Prize-winning poet Odysseus Elytis within the framework of international modernism, Marinos Pourgouris places the poet's work in the context of other modernist and surrealist writers in Europe. At the same time, Pourgouris puts forward a redefinition of European Modernism that makes the Mediterranean, and Greece in particular, the discursive contact zone and incorporates neglected elements such as national identity and geography. Beginning with an examination of Greek Modernism, Pourgouris's study places Elytis in conversation with Albert Camus; analyzes the influence of Charles Baudelaire, Gaston Bachelard, and Sigmund Freud on Elytis's theory of analogies; traces the symbol of the sun in Elytis's poetry by way of the philosophies of Heraclitus and Plotinus; examines the influence of Le Corbusier on Elytis's theory of architectural poetics; and takes up the subject of Elytis's application of his theory of Solar Metaphysics to poetic form in the context of works by Freud, C. G. Jung, and Michel Foucault. Informed by extensive research in the United States and Europe, Pourgouris's study makes a compelling contribution to the comparative study of Greek modernism, the Mediterranean, and the work of Odysseus Elytis.

With ties to Greece, France, and the United States, Nicolas Calas was a truly international poet, critic, and polemicist writing at the height of surrealism. Emerging on the scene in a vital period of Greek literary history in the early 1930s, he would begin his career as an important but little-known forerunner to that country's surrealism movement--and he would end it as an established poet and art critic in New York, known in the pages of the Village Voice, Art International, and Artforum, among others places. In this book, Lena Hoff offers the first intellectual biography of this important figure, one who embodied the restlessness that characterizes twentieth century arts and letters. Calas was an early innovator in Greece, fusing avant-garde poetics with Trotskyism and Freudo-Marxist principles. However, growing weary of his isolation and the relatively modest support he found in his native country, he moved to Paris in the mid-1930s, where he quickly gained a seat in the surrealist circle surrounding André Breton. On the eve of World War II, he then became one of the first surrealists to settle in New York, helping pave the way for the likes of Breton, Max Ernst, and Yves Tanguy. The story of a highly enigmatic poet and intellectual who moved freely between surrealism, futurism, and satire--and who put forward challenging ideas in his essays, reviews, and translations--this book also sheds new light on many of the avant-garde's most trenchant artistic advances.

Early twentieth-century visual artists Andre Masson and Pablo Picasso both used the Minotaur to represent their thoughts and experiences, but for very different reasons. The relationship of both artists to Surrealism, along with their life experiences, allowed the Greek figure to develop into their work. After Masson broke away from the Surrealist group, he had a strong relationship with theorist Georges Bataille. The two worked on their own journal Acephale. Masson's use of the Minotaur was highly inspired by the writings of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote extensively on Greek myth. It was in Acephale that Masson published numerous drawings related to the Cretan myth. Picasso's Minotaur, on the other hand, was mostly featured in his commission, the Vollard Suite. These drawings tell the tale of his faltering marriage to Olga Khokhlova and his mentally-deteriorating affair with Marie-Therese Walter. For these two artists, the Cretan myth was an expression for either the frustrations with personal relationships or the result of a deep-seated interest in a philosophical idea. The Minotaur was personal for them.In addition to laying the importance of the Minotaur to Masson and Picasso, another aim of this thesis is to solidify the place of the journal Minotaure in the canon of Surrealism as it relates to the theme of the Minotaur. Although Masson and Picasso were the two artists who brought the Minotaur into their work the most, the covers of Minotaure were decorated by such famous artists as Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse, and Rene Magritte amongst others. The covers show that the Minotaur was much more prevalent in Surrealism; they demonstrate it was not a coincidence that both Masson and Picasso illustrated the myth.