Capital of Pain, is considered one of the key texts of surrealism. This is the first new translation into English of this work in over 30 years and the only edition available in the English language. This edition presents the text in its entirety in a bilingual format and includes an extensive essay on Eluard's works by Mary Ann Caws. This book has had a lasting effect on poets and readers since it exploded unto the literary scene in 1926 and has never been out of print in Europe since.
Each volume of the Dictionary of World Biography contains 250 entries on the lives of the individuals who shaped their times and left their mark on world history. This is not a who's who. Instead, each entry provides an in-depth essay on the life and career of the individual concerned. Essays commence with a quick reference section that provides basic facts on the individual's life and achievements. The extended biography places the life and works of the individual within an historical context, and the summary at the end of each essay provides a synopsis of the individual's place in history. All entries conclude with a fully annotated bibliography.
Still lifes, landscapes, nudes, women's faces, portraits, and rayographs (photographs made without cameras) produced by Ray in the twenties and early thirties are accompanied by the comments of his contemporaries
The first reference work devoted to their lives and roles, this book provides information on some 200 artists' models from the Renaissance to the present day. Most entries are illustrated and consist of a brief biography, selected works in which the model appears (with location), a list of further reading. This will prove an invaluable reference work for art historians, librarians, museum and gallery curators, as well as students and researchers.
A moving and spectacular tale of love, jealousy, and exotic travel, centering on three significant figures in the surrealist movement. This book describes the secret journey made by an extraordinary ménage à trois: the painter Max Ernst, Paul Eluard (cofounder of surrealism with André Breton), and Eluard's wife Gala. The author unravels the story of Ernst's love affair with Gala, Eluard's disappearance, Ernst and Gala's pursuit of him, their meeting in Saigon where the love triangle came apart, and the resulting departure of the Eluards, who left Ernst to explore the jungles of French Indochina alone. The impact on the work of both men was profound. As for Gala, she eventually dropped both her lovers for Salvador Dali.
Cold War Negritude is the first book-length study of francophone Caribbean literature to foreground the political context of the global Cold War. It focuses on three canonical francophone Caribbean writers—René Depestre, Aimé Césaire, and Jacques-Stephen Alexis—whose literary careers and political alignments spanned all three “worlds” of the 1950s Cold War order. As black Caribbean authors who wrote in French, who participated directly in the global communist movement, and whose engagements with Marxist thought and practice were mediated by their colonial relationship to France, these writers expressed unique insight into this bipolar system as it was taking shape. The book shows how, over the course of the 1950s, French Caribbean Marxist authors re-evaluated the literary aesthetics of Negritude and sought to develop alternatives that would be adequate to the radically changed world system of the Cold War. Through close readings of literary, theoretical, and political texts by Depestre, Césaire, and Alexis, I show that this formal shift reflected a strikingly changed understanding of what it meant to write engaged literature in the new, bipolar world order. Debates about literary aesthetics became the proxy battlefield on which Antillean writers promoted and fought for their different visions of an emancipated Caribbean modernity. Consequent to their complicated Cold War alignments, these Antillean authors developed original and unorthodox Marxist literary aesthetics that syncretized an array of socialist literary tendencies from around the globe.
A look at how four French writers of the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s contributed to the rise of Stalin in their country and abroad. Generation Stalin traces Joseph Stalin’s rise as a dominant figure in French political culture from the 1930s through the 1950s. Andrew Sobanet brings to light the crucial role French writers played in building Stalin’s cult of personality and in disseminating Stalinist propaganda in the international Communist sphere, including within the USSR. Based on a wide array of sources—literary, cinematic, historical, and archival—Generation Stalin situates in a broad cultural context the work of the most prominent intellectuals affiliated with the French Communist Party, including Goncourt winner Henri Barbusse, Nobel laureate Romain Rolland, renowned poet Paul Eluard, and canonical literary figure Louis Aragon. Generation Stalin arrives at a pivotal moment, with the Stalin cult and elements of Stalinist ideology resurgent in twenty-first-century Russia and authoritarianism on the rise around the world. “This is an outstanding work of intellectual history. . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice “A landmark study, brilliantly written, containing exemplary scholarship. Sobanet establishes himself with this volume as one of the foremost interpreters of French intellectual life. He brings to his study a cornucopia of historical knowledge and the finesse of a first-class literary critic.” —Lawrence D. Kritzman, editor of The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought “This is an ambitious project that is well executed, with a readership that is potentially far reaching—with implications for Russian/Stalin studies, French studies, including politics and society, as well as propaganda writing and the role of the media more generally. . . . Generation Stalin is a very timely book.” —Denis M. Provencher, author of Queer French: Globalization, Language, and Sexual Citizenship in France “Sobanet’s study of “Generation Stalin” and the four writers he associates with the group, Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, Paul Eluard, and Louis Aragon, is, quite simply, magisterial. Written in lucid prose informed by meticulous and wide-ranging scholarship including archival material, books, essays, press items, and other relevant documents, the book provides an in-depth study of the rise of the Stalin cult in France.” —Carol J. Murphy, author of The Allegorical Impulse in the Works of Julien Gracq: History as Rhetorical Enactment in “Le Rivage des Syrtes” and “Un Balcon en forêt”
