Anthology of Black Humor
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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*Anthology of Black Humor (1940) by is an anthology of 'black humor' texts edited and commented upon by André Breton. It is currently in print in an English translation in a 1997 translation on City Lights Books ISBN 0872863212.
Featured authors
- Jonathan Swift
- D.-A.-F.de Sade
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
- Charles Fourier
- Thomas De Quincey
- Pierre-François Lacenaire
- Christian Dietrich Grabbe
- Petrus 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
- O. Henry
- André Gide
- John Millington Synge
- Alfred Jarry
- Raymond Roussel
- Francis Picabia
- Guillaume Apollinaire
- Pablo Picasso
- Arthur Cravan
- Franz Kafka
- Jakob van Hoddis
- Marcel Duchamp
- Hans Arp
- Alberto Savinio
- Jacques Vaché
- Benjamin Péret
- Jacques Rigaut
- Jacques Prévert
- Salvador Dali
- Jean Ferry
- Leonora Carrington
- Gisèle Prassinos
- Jean-Pierre Duprey
Notes to the English translation
This is the first publication in English of the anthology that contains Breton's definitive statement on l'humour noir, one of the seminal concepts of Surrealism, and his provocative assessments of the writers he most admired. While some of the authors featured in the Anthology of Black Humor are already well known to American readers-Swift, Kafka, Rimbaud, Poe, Lewis Carroll, and Baudelaire among them (and even then, Breton's selections are often surprising)-many others are sure to come as a revelation.
The entries range from the acerbic aphorisms of Swift, Lichtenberg, and Duchamp to the theatrical slapstick of Christian Dietrich Grabbe, from the wry missives of Rimbaud and Jacques Vache to the manic paranoia of Dali, from the ferocious iconoclasm of Alfred Jarry and Arthur Craven to the offhand hilarity of Apollinaire at his most spontaneous. For each of the forty-five authors included, Breton has provided an enlightening biographical and critical preface, situating both the writer and the work in the context of black humor-a partly macabre, partly ironic, and often absurd turn of spirit that Breton defined as "a superior revolt of the mind."
Andre Breton (1896-1966), the founder and principal theorist of the Surrealist movement, is one of the major literary figures of the past century. His best-known works in English translation include Nadja, Mad Love, The Manifestoes of Surrealism, The Magnetic Fields (with Philippe Soupault), and Earthlight. Mark Polizzotti is the author of Revolution of the Mind: The Life of Andre Breton.
