Historical Dictionary of Surrealism

Keith Aspley was successively an assistant lecturer, lecturer, senior lecturer, and an honorary fellow of the University of Edinburgh.

Aspley (French, Univ. of Edinburgh) has written an excellent go-to reference volume that encourages dipping in, browsing, and making connections among writers, painters, poets, filmmakers, and others involved in various artistic arenas relating to surrealism. The introductory essay provides an excellent overview of the movement, as does the separate chronology…. For readers interested in art, performance, and literary movements, this is an excellent reference.

Despite surrealism's celebration of the subconscious and eschewal of reason, the movement was nevertheless concerned with definitions. André Breton included a dictionary-style entry for surréalisme in his 1924 Manifeste du surréalisme and later explored juxtapositions of the absurd and the mundane in the 1938 Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme. To the mountain of literature that seeks to organize the far-reaching intellectual movement, Aspley (honorary fellow, Univ. of Edinburgh) adds this handy volume that organizes the breadth of surrealism into concise entries on artists, writers, artworks, and themes. A chronology highlights events that sparked the surrealist imagination, activities of formal surrealist groups, and exhibitions. An introductory essay and extensive bibliography are included. One of the few English-language reference sources about surrealism published in the last decade, Aspley's dictionary is useful for quick access to key terms and biographies.

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The above was once available on scribd and we had it embedded here, but it was deleted (happens frequently on that site). 

check it out on amazon
​(rare and expensive) 

We found another book, available as PDF:  
​A CAVALIER HISTORY OF SURREALISM
by Jules-Francois Dupuis
[Raoul Vaneigem]
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith

click to open in separate window► 

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Related subject, recommended for further reading: 
MANIFESTO OF SURREALISM by André Breton

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