Break of Day

Originally published in France in 1934, Break of Day is Andr Bretons second collection of critical and polemical essays, following The Lost Steps (Nebraska 1996). In fewer than two hundred pages, it captures the first full decade of the surrealist movement. The collection opens with an essay composed in 1924 that examines key elements of surrealism and concludes with Bretons harsh revaluation in 1933 of automatic writing. Among the other essays in the volume are Burial Denied and In Self-Defense, two pieces that, in translator Mark Polizzottis words, mark surrealisms conscious break from the mainstream and the beginning of its attempts to work alongside the French Communist Party. Also included are Psychiatry Standing before Surrealism, which addresses Bretons complex, ambivalent views on mental illness and the emerging psychiatric establishment; Introduction to Achim von Arnim's Strange Tales, which reveals surrealisms debt to such precursors as the German romantics and delineates a surrealistic aesthetic of the macabre; and Picasso in His Element, in which Breton demonstrates his formidable talents as a critic of the visual arts.