ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the contours of fierce debates over Surrealism's Anglicisation. It provides a prolepsis or model of Franco-Anglo avant-garde influence. The chapter focuses on the historical and political character of first-wave English Surrealism and Madge and Jennings' contributions to Mass-Observation's earliest publications. It proposes that Mass-Observation can be understood as their effort to negotiate the perceived incompatibility between English culture and 'French' Surrealism. The effort to bring Surrealism to England began across a range of journals that included Experiment, transition, New Verse, and Left Review. English Surrealism had emerged with a heightened awareness of its political character because Breton's French movement by the mid-1930s had experienced a long-running yet fraught relationship with the Third International and the French Communist Party. Mass-Observation's inheritance from English Surrealism included the latter's uncertain sense of its own political agency. Mass-Observation's political ambiguity is reflected in the range of criticism, which admonishes its excessively polemical perspective.
