Surrealism and the novel
“Surrealism and the Novel” is the first full-length study of surrealism’s impact on fiction. It explains how surrealist writers came to terms with the novel and how their ideas helped to transform it. J.H. Matthews discusses influences on the surrealist novel and examines surrealist experiments in selected novels by writers who were members of the surrealist group or who were influenced by it. The author shows how the attitudes of these writers have revolutionized both content and structure of the novel from the twenties to the sixties. The surrealists’ emphasis on freedom, protest, and the imagination made way for a new kind of literature which has left its mark on the way we think and even on the way we live. “Surrealism and the Novel” establishes the importance of fiction in the twentieth century’s major artistic movement, and it underscores the debt that many of today’s novels owe to surrealism.