Dreams, the Female Gaze, and the City of Paris: Urban Landscapes through the Writings of the Surrealist Movement

From the time of the Renaissance, treaties on architecture, odes to the arts, and the study of their canons through written sources, have served to defend, emphasise, or proclaim the validity of different artistic forms and styles. In this way, programmes and manifestos have reinforced the character of organisations and movements through their fundamental ideas. The artistic Avantgardes have thus used this literary resource to lay the theoretical foundations for their future artistic contributions, being able to justify without any qualifications their most extravagant occurrences. The Avant-garde manifesto shall therefore be considered a literary contribution written in the first place for the subsequent development of the artistic and creative activity of the group or school. The Surrealist Movement generated a lot of written work because the founders, André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault, were writers. Some of these texts included the Movement’s two manifestos, periodicals such as Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, Littérature, or Minotaure, and individual writings that were penned by Breton and Aragon. This study will relate the Surrealist written work with the Movement’s idea of the city and its urban imaginary.

A Mythological Nudist Lost in Swedish Suburbia: A study of the Nix’s masculinity and media-loric function in the manga series Oblivion High

This article explores the visual representation and function of the folkloric Scandinavian nix in the manga series Oblivion High (2012–2014) published by the manga studio Ms Mandu. The aim of the research is to investigate how a well-known folkloric image develops and to consider the nix’s portrayal of masculinity. The article is a critical cultural study based on feminist and queer perspectives on visual culture and folklore studies. The article concludes that the nix in Oblivion High must update his desirability through spectacular clothing and change of musical instrument to meet the contemporary Western heteronormative masculinity ideals. His weakness to the metal iron ties into the nix’s association to fairies and the construction of the nix’s underwater realm is connected to Norse mythology with the appearance of Aino from the Finish national epos Kalevala, Nornorna and hints of the Norse god Odin. Furthermore, the androgynous art style of shōjo manga (a sub-genre aimed at female teenage readers) creates a heterosexual female gaze pattern, while the imagery of a bishōnen (beautiful boy) connects the character Nix to the literary trope of the ‘pretty boy,’ leaving hegemonic masculinity unchallenged.