The Surrealists were big on this thing called "automatic writing." That's when you write whatever comes to your mind without stopping or structuring your thoughts. You just go with the flow, and le...

One of the defining stylistic characteristics of Surrealism is the juxtaposition of imagery. The Surrealists like to put together crazy things that we wouldn't normally associate with one another....

Another stylistic strategy that the Surrealists are known for, which is related to their use of juxtaposition and automatic writing, is association. "Association" refers to the connections that we...

The Surrealists thought that Western society placed too much emphasis on rationality. The problem with rationality, according to them, is that there is a whole realm of experience that exists outsi...

Ahh… the spooky, spooky unconscious. That deep, dark place beneath our conscious minds, where all that stuff from our childhood is buried, as well as all our fears and neuroses. The Surrealists w...

We knew this one was coming. After all, if the Surrealists are interested in the unconscious mind and the irrational, how could they not be interested in dreams and fantasies? Dreams and fantasies...

The Surrealists were revolutionary writers. That is, they felt that there was something seriously wrong with the society in which they lived. That society, remember, had just come out of World War...

The massive destruction caused by WWI had a huge impact on the literary scene. After the end of the war, many writers felt that they had to reckon with the meaning of so much blood 'n' guts. Surrea...

You can think of Dadaism as the older cousin of Surrealism. The Dadaists, like the Surrealists, were way into in the irrational, and their work emphasized this. They also wanted to destroy the old...

How revolutionary was Surrealism? Shucks, it had its very own manifesto.In 1924, André Breton, a French poet who is also the most important figure in the Surrealist movement, issued The First Mani...