Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (The Surrealist Revolution Series)

Beginning in Paris in the 1920s, women poets, essayists, painters, and artists in other media have actively collaborated in defining and refining surrealisms basic projectachieving 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 participantsperhaps only feminism itself. Yet outside the movement, womens 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 womens contributions to surrealism. Letting surrealist women speak for themselves, Penelope Rosemont has assembled nearly three hundred texts by ninetysix women from twentyeight countries. She opens the book with a succinct summary of surrealisms basic aims and principles, followed by a discussion of the place of gender in the movements 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 surrealists work with a brief biographical statement.