Although first named, with a term borrowed from Apollinaire, in André Breton's manifesto of 1924, the roots of the Surrealist movement are to be found rather earlier with the establishment in 1919 of the review Littérature under the direction of Breton, Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon, all then poets in their early twenties. Beginning as a fairly catholic forum for the French avant-garde generally, Tristan Tzara's transportation of Dada from its original home in Zurich to Paris after the end of the first world war provided the catalyst for Littérature's turn to a more radical and specific instantiation of avant-garde rebellion. Indeed the membership of Paris Dada in the early 1920s, such as it was, c

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Published 16 March 2001

Citation: Cunningham, David. "Surrealism". The Literary Encyclopedia. 16 March 2001.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1076, accessed 9 February 2010.]