The fictions of Arthur Cravan

The legendary poet and boxer Arthur Cravan a fleeting figure on the periphery of early twentieth-century European avant-gardism is frequently invoked as proto-Dada and Surrealist exemplar. Yet he remains an insubstantial phenomenon not seen since 1918 lost through historical interstices clouded in drifting untruths. This study processes philosophical positions into a practical recovery - from nineteenth-century Nietzsche to twentieth-century Deleuze - with thoughts on subjectivity metaphor representation and multiplicity. From fresh readings and new approaches - of Cravan's first published work as a manifesto of simulation; of contributors to his Paris review <i>Maintenant </i>as impostures for the Delaunays; and of the conjuring of Cravan in Picabia's elegiac film <i>Entr'acte</i> - <i>The fictions of Arthur Cravan</i> concludes with the absent poet-boxer's eventual casting off into a Surrealist legacy and his becoming what metaphor is: a means to represent the world.