Language of Surrealism

The Language of Surrealism explores the revolutionary experiments in language and mind undertaken by the surrealists across Europe between the wars. Highly influential on the development of art, literary modernism, and current popular culture, surrealist style remains challenging, striking, resonant and thrilling – and the techniques by which surrealist writing achieves this are set out clearly in this book. Stockwell draws on recent work in cognitive poetics and literary linguistics to re-evaluate surrealism in its own historical setting. In the process, the book questions later critical theoretical views of language that have distorted our ideas about both surrealism and language itself. What follows is a piece of literary criticism that is fully contextualised, historically sensitive, and textually driven, and which sets out in rich and readable detail this most intriguing and disturbing literature.

'This is the book on surrealism that we have been waiting for in stylistics and twentieth century literary studies. With full contextualisation of the movement and its affiliated figures, Stockwell offers insight into surrealist writing processes, the composition of surrealist texts, and their literary experience for contemporary readers. Ultimately, Stockwell systematically demonstrates not only that surrealism is characterised by the dissonance of defamiliarisation and immersion, but also that modern stylistic analysis is paramount to unravelling the politics and dream-like texture of the surrealist enterprise.' - Dr Alison Gibbons, Sheffield Hallam University, UK 'A completely fascinating and engaging read: Stockwell combines a rich, in-depth consideration of the 'historical moment' of production with the rigour of stylistic/cognitive poetic observation. The result is to go beyond the mere classification of 'surrealist text' to illuminate surrealist writerly technique and the readerly experience of surreal image.' - Dr Lisa Nahajec, Liverpool Hope University, UK

Peter Stockwell is Professor of Literary Linguistics at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is the author or editor of 30 books in literary stylistics, sociolinguistics and cognitive poetics, including Texture (Edinburgh University Press), Cognitive Poetics (Routledge), The Poetics of Science Fiction (Pearson), and the co-edited volumes The Language and Literature Reader (Routledge), Cognitive Grammar in Literature (Benjamins), Contemporary Stylistics (Bloomsbury), and The Handbook of Stylistics (Cambridge University Press).