ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book indicates the tremendous range of surrealism's interests and intellectual engagements. Its willingness to encounter existing ideas, not only absorbing some of their aspects but also challenging some and diverting others towards its own purposes while generating distinctive concepts for its own use. The book deals with the most significant contexts within which surrealism was oriented, dealing with themes such as revolution, imagination and utopia. It presents without any intention of imposing a hierarchy in its order, the key concepts developed by surrealism itself. The book dedicates to the memory of Raihan Kadri, whose writing was to have been substantially but whose thought helped encourage and construct its planning, and epitomizes surrealism's ability, nearly a century after its inception, to engage the minds of successive generations. It highlights the mechanisms, through which the surrealists invested physical objects with latent and revelatory meanings.
