Michel Leiris

This is the first full-length study in English of the work of Michel Leiris a central figure in contemporary French culture. It explores Leiris''s participation in some of the most striking intellectual and artistic movements of the twentieth-century: surrealism ethnography and existentialism. Comparing his writing to the major artistic political and philosophical concepts of the period Hand asserts that Leiris''s multi-volume autobiography remains as the model form of twentieth century self-inquiry.