In A Surrealist Stratigraphy of Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm Catriona Mc Ara offers the first critical study of the literary work of the celebrated American painter and sculptor Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012). Mc Ara fills a major gap in the scholarship repositioning Tanning’s writing at the centre of her entire creative oeuvre and focusing on a little-known short story Abyss a gothic-flavoured desert adventure which Tanning worked on intermittently throughout her creative life finally publishing it in 2004 as Chasm: A Weekend. Mc Ara performs a major reassessment of the visual and literary principles upon which the surrealist movement was initially founded. Combining a groundbreaking methodological approach with reference to cultural theory and feminist aesthetics as well as Tanning’s unpublished journals and notes Mc Ara reveals Tanning as a key player in contemporary art practice as well as in the historical surrealist milieu.|A Surrealist Stratigraphy of Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm | Visual Studies
