Sacred Surrealism, Dissidence and International Avant-Garde Prose

In her consideration of the surrealist genre of prose literature, Vivienne Brough-Evans proposes a compelling new way of reevaluating aspects of international surrealism by means of the category of divin fou. She deploys theories of sacred ecstasy – as developed by George Bataille and the Collège de Sociologie (1937–39) – inflected by ekstasis as a critical tool in shedding new light on the literary oeuvre of non-French writers who worked both within and against a surrealist framework.