Surrealist experimentation in the work of Anaïs Nin

Cray, Josie 2025. Surrealist experimentation in the work of Anaïs Nin. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

This thesis examines Anaïs Nin’s often overlooked encounters with surrealism. Rather than attempting to answer the question ‘Is Nin a Surrealist’, I examine how her experimentation with surrealist aesthetics and concerns develops over the course of her writing career. To do so, I argue for a reconsideration of the role of the Diaries as a key component of Nin’s literary method. Using the idea of the encounter, I place Nin’s engagement with surrealist aesthetics and concerns in dialogue with work by Dorothea Tanning, Frida Kahlo and Leonor Fini. The work of these artists, which challenges, subverts and rejects masculine surrealist treatments of women and their bodies, provides a useful starting point to unpack Nin’s surrealist experiments with space, maternity and motherhood, and costume. In the first chapter I turn to Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories (1977) to argue that the roots of her idea of ‘psychological reality’ and surrealist experiments can be found in her earliest short stories. In the second chapter I explore Nin’s evolving construction of non-domestic, alternative dwellings in relation to Tanning’s depictions of space. I trace a shift from spaces characterised by the threat of stasis to places of potential transformation and rebirth. The third chapter investigates maternity and motherhood in Nin’s and Kahlo’s work, focusing on their reimagining of the surrealist Mother figure as a maternal subject. The final chapter explores how costume becomes a tool to explore the multiplicity of self in Nin’s work, placing her in dialogue with Fini to unpack ideas of performance, shock, and refashioning the surrealist treatment of women’s bodies. By focusing on these themes, I tease out new readings of Nin’s work through a surrealist lens to reveal her experiments with recentring the female body, the multiplicity of self, and her development of a ‘psychological reality’.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Funders:	Sir Richard Stapley Education Trust, The Reid Trust
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	12 January 2026
Last Modified:	12 Jan 2026 14:31
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/183749

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