Imaginary Paris: Surrealism and popular culture in early twentieth-century France

"Imaginary Paris" is an interpretive history of surreal, mass print culture in France during the early twentieth century. The broad thesis is that certain forms of mass culture, such as fantastic popular fiction and sensationalist journalism, formally operated according to surrealist principles in advance of the surrealist movement of the nineteen-twenties. In this context, surrealism was not a sui generis avant-garde movement of the interwar period, created out of the crucible of the Great War, but a broader mentality diffused within turn-of-the-century mass print culture.;The dissertation is about Paris in a double sense. First, Paris was constructed as an imaginary city both in surrealist novels, such as Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris, and in common guidebooks. Second, Paris was the location from which a surreal cultural imagination was produced. The Fantomas series of popular novels, newspaper coverage of mass-murderer Landru, and suicide faits divers in the daily press, each had cultural origins in Paris. However, the surreal imagination imbedded within those printed sources was consumed internationally.;The first chapter examines Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris as a guidebook to the surrealist imagination, and then investigates guidebooks to Paris for their imaginary features. The second chapter explores the Fantomas popular novel series by Souvestre and Allain for its surreal motifs, and briefly reviews the cultural appropriation of Fantomas by the surrealists. The third chapter traces the development of the story of Landru, the "Bluebeard of Gambais," as a form of automatic writing in the daily Parisian press, and explores how that story functioned as a form of surreal, dark humor. The fourth chapter reconceptualizes the surrealist inquiry, "Is Suicide a Solution?", by charting the ideological separation of suicide faits divers from late-nineteenth medical morality. The conclusion returns to larger issues of mass culture and historical processes in early twentieth-century France, and argues that although surrealism failed as an avant-garde movement, its disturbing and provocative tendencies still inhabit the byways of mass culture.