Surrealism

Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author was a watershed in the history of drama because its form and content were so revolutionary. And to some extent Pirandello's play relates to a more systematic artistic revolution in the 1920s— Surrealism. As C.W.E. Bigsby has said, Surrealism "is essentially concerned with liberating the imagination and with expanding the definition of reality."

The Surrealists insisted that by freeing the mind from the limiting controls of rationality, logic, consciousness, or aesthetic conventions, an artist could reach a higher reality that would include the fantastic and the marvelous—qualities that had generally been considered antithetical to realism. Coined by French poet Guillaume Apollinaire and championed by French poet Andre Breton, the term was described in Breton's famous 1924 Manifesto on Surrealism as a resolution of two states of mind— dream and reality. Joined together, these two...