The Surrealist Image

This first full-length study of imagery in French surrealist poetry applies recent linguistic theory and methodology to the question of style in the image. It begins by examining the linguistic principles underlying the surrealist theory of the image and then develops a methodology for describing and analyzing specific examples of surrealist images from the point of view of their phonetic, syntactic, and semantic characteristics. Rather than a comprehensive survey and classification of images, the study undertakes to discover and evaluate the main stylistic devices and controlling stylistic principles of surrealists' imagery.