Surrealism and the Gothic is the first book-length analysis of the role played by the gothic in both the initial emergence of surrealism and at key moments in its subsequent development as an art and literary movement. The book argues the strong and sustained influence, not only of the classic gothic novel itself – Ann Radcliffe, Charles Maturin, Matthew Lewis, etc. – but also the determinative impact of closely related phenomena, as with the influence of mediumism, alchemy and magic. The book also traces the later development of the gothic novel, as with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and its mutation into such works of popular fiction as the Fantômas series of Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, enthusiastically taken up by writers such as Apollinaire and subsequently feeding into the development of surrealism. More broadly, the book considers a range of motifs strongly associated with gothic writing, as with insanity, incarceration and the ‘accursed outsider’, explored in relation to the personal experience and electroshock treatment of Antonin Artaud. A recurring motif of the analysis is that of the gothic castle, developed in the writings of André Breton, Artaud, Sade, Julien Gracq and other writers, as well as in the work of visual artists such as Magritte.

This small collection of essays explores women’s relationship with the gothic: a relationship which has, since its eighteenth-century beginnings, always been complex. These essays demonstrate some of the scope and diversity of that relationship, and much of its intensity: the ingenuity and genius employed, the anguish experienced and the risks taken, in its evolution. Genuinely representative of gothic’s flexibility and presence in everything from novels to architecture, from surrealist art to hypertext fiction, this volume brings new primary sources and topics to the reader’s attention, and will be of interest to anyone who wants to expand and challenge their understanding of how and why women engage with the gothic.

The Gothic is a contested and complicated phenomenon, extending over many centuries and across all the arts. In The Edinburgh Companion to the Gothic and the Arts, the range of essays run from medieval architecture and design to contemporary gaming and internet fiction; from classical painting to the modern novel; from ballet and dance to contemporary Goth music. The contributors include many of the best-known critics of the Gothic (e.g., Hogle, Punter, Spooner, Bruhm) as well as newer names such as Kirk and Round. The editor has put all these contributors in touch with each other in the preparation of their essays in order to ensure the maximum benefit to the reader by producing a well-integrated book which will prove much more than a collection of disparate essays, but rather a distinctive contribution to a field.

In this study of surrealism and ghostliness, Katharine Conley provides a new, unifying theory of surrealist art and thought based on history and the paradigm of puns and anamorphosis. In Surrealist Ghostliness, Conley discusses surrealism as a movement haunted by the experience of World War I and the repressed ghost of spiritualism. From the perspective of surrealist automatism, this double haunting produced a unifying paradigm of textual and visual puns that both pervades surrealist thought and art and commemorates the surrealists’ response to the Freudian unconscious. Extending the gothic imagination inherited from the eighteenth century, the surrealists inaugurated the psychological century with an exploration of ghostliness through doubles, puns, and anamorphosis, revealing through visual activation the underlying coexistence of realities as opposed as life and death. Surrealist Ghostliness explores examples of surrealist ghostliness in film, photography, painting, sculpture, and installation art from the 1920s through the 1990s by artists from Europe and North America from the center to the periphery of the surrealist movement. Works by Man Ray, Claude Cahun, Brassaï and Salvador Dalí, Lee Miller, Dorothea Tanning, Francesca Woodman, Pierre Alechinsky, and Susan Hiller illuminate the surrealist ghostliness that pervades the twentieth-century arts and compellingly unifies the century’s most influential yet disparate avant-garde movement.

Lowbrow Art is Pop Surrealism at its best: a stunning blast of the weird and wonderful, with exaggerated shapes and doleful eyes, stripy stockings mixed with ornate decor, all served with lashings of style and humour. Featuring artworks by such talented artists as Jasmine Becket-Griffith, Dadara and Scott Rohlfs, this incredible new book in the Gothic Dreams series is a real feast for the eyes!