Surrealist Women: An International Anthology - Paperback

by Penelope Rosemont (Editor)

Beginning in Paris in the 1920s, women poets, essayists, painters, and artists in other media have actively collaborated in defining and refining surrealism's basic project-achieving a higher, open, and dynamic consciousness, from which no aspect of the real or the imaginary is rejected. Indeed, few artistic or social movements can boast as many women forebears, founders, and participants-perhaps only feminism itself. Yet outside the movement, women's contributions to surrealism have been largely ignored or simply unknown.

This anthology, the first of its kind in any language, displays the range and significance of women's contributions to surrealism. Letting surrealist women speak for themselves, Penelope Rosemont has assembled nearly three hundred texts by ninety-six women from twenty-eight countries. She opens the book with a succinct summary of surrealism's basic aims and principles, followed by a discussion of the place of gender in the movement's origins. She then organizes the book into historical periods ranging from the 1920s to the present, with introductions that describe trends in the movement during each period. Rosemont also prefaces each surrealist's work with a brief biographical statement.

Back Jacket

This anthology, the first of its kind in any language, displays the range and significance of women's contributions to surrealism. Letting surrealist women speak for themselves, Penelope Rosemont has assembled nearly three hundred texts by ninety-seven women from twenty-eight countries in Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and the African diaspora. Their works include poems, tales, dreams, essays of radical social criticism, inquiries into psychoanalysis, critical approaches to philosophical as well as topical problems, celebrations of the work of particular poets and painters, and several examples of surrealist games.