Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute / Edition 3

by Anna Balakian

Overview

First published in 1959, Surrealism remains the most readable introduction to the French surrealist poets Apollinaire, Breton, Aragon, Eluard, and Reverdy. Providing a much-needed overview of the movement, Balakian places the surrealists in the context of early twentieth-century Paris and describes their reactions to symbolist poetry, World War I, and developments in science and industry, psychology, philosophy, and painting. Her coherent history of the movement is enhanced by her firsthand knowledge of the intellectual climate in which some of these poets worked and her interviews with Reverdy and Breton. In a new introduction, Balakian discusses the influence of surrealism on contemporary poetry.

This volume includes photographs of the poets and reproductions of paintings by Ernst, Dali, Tanguy, and others.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226035604
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	01/15/1987
Edition description:	3rd Edition
Pages:	270
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Peter Balakian is the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor in Humanities and professor of English at Colgate University. He is the author of five books of poems and three prose works, including The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, a New York Times best seller; and Black Dog of Fate, a memoir.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the third edition
Introduction
Preface to the First Edition
The Signal Lights
1. Out of the Forest of Symbols
2. Lautréamont's Battle with God
3. Saint-Pol-Roux and the Apocalypse
4. Apollinaire and l'Esprit Nouveau
5. Pierre Reverdy and the Materio-Mysticism of Our Age
The Road
6. Breton and the Surrealist Mind—The Influences of Freud and Hegel
7. The Surrealist Image
8. The Surrealist Object
The Bend in the Road
9. The Post-Surrealism of Aragon and Eluard
10. To Transform the World
11. The World Transformed
Epilogue
Index