| Abstrakt: |
Published a year before the landmark London International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, Hugh Sykes Davies's prose poem Petron continues to resist both aesthetic and political categorisation. This essay clarifies Petron's contribution to the Surrealist movement in England by reading its densely allusive text as one which limns Surrealist technique and Marxist theory within a specifically English rural setting. Identifying the wanderings of its hero, Petron, as a Surrealist riff on the popular communist hikes or 'Red Rambles' of the 1930s, the essay shows how Petron combines radical politics and Surrealist method in its phantasmagoric representation of a fenced, enclosed, degraded, and often inaccessible English landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
