Manchester University Press- Surrealist Women's Writing A Critical Exploration

Featuring essays by leading scholars of surrealism, this book offers the first sustained critical inquiry into the multifaceted writing of women associated with surrealism, and highlights howthis oeuvre intersects with and contributes to contemporary debates on gender, sexuality, subjectivity, otherness, anthropocentrism, and the environment.

While many women surrealists worked across different media such as painting, sculpture, photography, and writing, contemporary historiographies have tended to foreground the visual aspects of this oeuvre. Featuring original essays by leading scholars of surrealism, Surrealist women’s writing: A critical exploration is the first sustained critical inquiry into the writing of women associated with surrealism. The volume demonstrates the extent and the historical, linguistic, and culturally contextual breadth of this writing, and highlights how the specifically surrealist poetics and politics that characterise these writers’ work intersects with and contributes to contemporary debates on, for example, gender, sexuality, subjectivity, otherness, anthropocentrism, and the environment.

Drawing on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, the essays in the volume focus on the writing of numerous women surrealists, many of whom have hitherto mainly been known for their visual rather than their literary production. These include Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Kay Sage, Colette Peignot, Suzanne Césaire, Unica Zürn, Ithell Colquhoun, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, and Rikki Ducornet.

Surrealist women’s writing: A critical exploration offers an important resource for scholars and students across the fields of modernist literature, the historical avant-garde, literary and visual surrealism and its legacies, feminism, and critical theory.

Surrealist women’s writing: A critical exploration is the first sustained critical inquiry into the writing of women associated with surrealism. Featuring original essays by leading scholars of surrealism, the volume demonstrates the extent and the historical, linguistic, and culturally contextual breadth of this writing. It also highlights how the specifically surrealist poetics and politics of these writers’ work intersect with and contribute to contemporary debates on, for example, gender, sexuality, subjectivity, otherness, anthropocentrism, and the environment.

Drawing on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, the essays in the volume focus on the writing of numerous women surrealists, many of whom have hitherto mainly been known for their visual rather than their literary production. These include Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Kay Sage, Colette Peignot, Suzanne Césaire, Unica Zürn, Ithell Colquhoun, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, and Rikki Ducornet.