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methodological approach with reference to cultural theory and feminist aesthetics, and with access to Tannings unpublished journals and notes, McAra reveals Tanning as a key player in contemporary art practice as well as in the historical surrealist milieu.
