Any attempt at surveying American Surrealisms is likely to attract a certain amount of suspicion insofar as there has never existed such a thing as a large organic Surrealist movement in the United States. Instead, Surrealist activity in America has been characterized by interactions, exchanges, and influences in a number of heterogeneous fields, at different times and in different forms. Despite these discontinuities, between 1920 and 1940, contact with European Surrealism significantly shaped the cultural agendas of American writers and artists. As Dickran Tashjian showed in his 1995 seminal cultural history of Surrealism in America, the American avant-garde's ambivalent response to Surrealism "skewed the politics of American culture at its deepest reaches" (Tashjian 9). Over the past two decades, scholarly interest in the topic has continued to expand our understanding of the variety of practices carried out by American modernists in the attempt to forge their vernacular version of Surrealism and rearticulate the cultural life of the interwar United States.
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