Ebook: Anthology of Black Humour

This is Breton's definitive statement on l'humour noir, one of the seminal concepts of Surrealism. In his provocative anthology of the writers he most admires, Breton discusses the acerbic aphorisms of Swift, Lichtenberg and Duchamp, the theatrical slapstick of Christian Dietrich Grabbe, the wry missives of Rimbaud, the manic paranoia of Dalí, the ferocious iconoclasm of Alfred Jarry and the offhand hilarity of Apollinaire. For each of the authors included, Breton provides an enlightening preface, situating both the writer and the work in the context of black humour – a partly macabre,;Cover; Title; Copyright; Contents; Introduction: Laughter in the Dark, Mark Polizotti; Foreword to the 1966 French Edition; Lightning Rod, André Breton; Jonathan Swift; D.A.F. de Sade; Georg Christoph Lichtenberg; Charles Fourier; Thomas De Quincey; Pierre-François Lacenaire; Christian Dietrich Grabbe; Pétrus Borel; Edgar Allan Poe; Xavier Forneret; Charles Baudelaire; Lewis Carroll; Villiers de l'Isle-Adam; Charles Cros; Friedrich Nietzsche; Isidore Ducasse (Comte de Lautréamont); Joris-Karl Huysmans; Tristan Corbière; Germain Nouveau; Arthur Rimbaud; Alphonse Allais; Jean-Pierre Brisset.