Join the International Society for the Study of Surrealism for a free virtual discussion about the first major anthology in English on the surrealist novel, with Anna Watz and surrealist (and Dalkey Archive author) Rikki Ducornet.
A History of the Surrealist Novel offers a rich, long, and elastic historiography of the surrealist novel, taking into consideration an abundance of texts previously left out of critical accounts. Its twenty thematically organized chapters examine surrealist prose texts written in French, English, Spanish, German, Greek, and Japanese, from the emergence of the surrealist movement in the 1920s and 1930s, through the post-war and postmodern periods, and up to the contemporary moment. This approach extends received narratives regarding surrealism's geographical locations and considers its transnational movement and modes of circulation. Moreover, it challenges critical biases that have defined surrealism in predominantly masculine terms, and which tie the movement to the interwar or early post-war years. This book will appeal both to scholars and students of surrealism and its legacies, modernist literature, and the history of the novel.
Anna Watz is Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor of English Literature at Linköping University. Her current research (funded by the Swedish Research Council, 2019-2022) examines the intersection between surrealist women’s art and writing and the emergence of French poststructuralist/psychoanalytic feminist theory.
Watz is the author of Angela Carter and Surrealism: ‘A Feminist Libertarian Aesthetic’ (Routledge, 2016) and editor of Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration (Manchester University Press, 2020) and A History of the Surrealist Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
She is Reviews Editor for The International Journal of Surrealism (University of Minnesota Press), an editorial board member of the research network and journal Intersec+ions (Cardiff University), and an advisory board member of the Angela Carter Society (UWE, Bristol). Between 2018-2020 she served a three-year term as author of the section ‘Feminisms’ for the annual journal The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory (Oxford University Press).
Rikki Ducornet is a transdisciplinary artist. Her work is animated by an interest in nature, Eros, Abusive Authority, subversion and the transcendent capacities of the Creative Imagination. A writer and painter, her novels are published in over a dozen languages, and her paintings exhibited internationally, including most recently: a retrospective in conjunction with ‘Wounded Galaxies’ (University of Indiana, 2018), Dox Contemporary Art: ‘I Welcome’, Amnesty International (Prague, 2018) , The National Library of Costa Rica (2016), The Itau Foundation (Santiago, Chile, 2011).
The author of ten novels, collections of essays, short fiction and poetry, her work has received The Bard College Arts and Letters Award (1998), The Lannan Literary Award for Fiction (2004) and The Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2008). Her novel, The Jade Cabinet, was a finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Award (1993). She has received numerous fellowships including a Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe, a Copeland Colloquium fellowship at Amherst College, and most recently, support from The Foundation Beaumarchais (Paris). She has been a tenured Writer in Residence at both Denver University (1988-2000) and the University of Louisiana, Lafayette (2008); a Visiting Hurst Professor at Washington University St. Louis (2009) and a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Trento, Italy (1994).
Of her work, William Gass has written: “Rikki Ducornet’s books search for a way to heal the wound in our psyche—our shame and suppression of our nature—which has led not only to denial of this world on behalf of another one, but has repeatedly allowed authority and its agents to blind us to beauty, to make our passions poisonous, and to corral and confine the imagination.”