Peter De Vries and Surrealism

Dan Campion

1995
240 pages
ISBN 0-8387-5311-6

Peter De Vries and Surrealism rereads De Vries in the light of surrealism and argues that the novelist and poet devised a new comic form, surrealist farce. The novelty and paradoxical nature of this form help to account for the widely divergent interpretations and assessments that have been accorded De Vries, arguably the funniest American novelist since Mark Twain.
De Vries style and narrative technique are often surrealistic, and he mentions surrealism and surrealists in all but two of his twenty-six books. Yet, in fifty years of commentary on De Vries, scarcely any notice has been taken of these surrealist elements. This study moves from literary biography and historiography, which establish De Vries's points of contact with surrealism, through textual analysis, which traces De Vries's working though modernism toward surrealism in his early writing, to a consideration of De Vries's mature works that takes into account their surrealist aspects and allusions.

About the author:

Dan Campion is a visiting assistant professor of English at the University of Iowa. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, he received his B.A. in English from the University of Chicago in 1970 and attended the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he earned an M.A. in English in 1975. He received his Ph.D. in English in 1989 from the University of Iowa. Campion has worked on the editorial staffs of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, the Follett Publishing Company, and the American College Testing Program, and as a freelance writer and editor. Several hundred of his poems, stories, articles, and reviews have appeared in periodicals and anthologies, and he has published a chapbook of poems, Calypso (1981), and coedited the anthology Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (1981).