Antonin Artaud - Collected Works (19 books)

* Antonin Artaud - Collected Works (19 books)

ANTONIN ARTAUD (1896 – 1948) was a French dramatist, poet, actor, and theoretician of the Surrealist movement who is widely recognized as a major figure of the European avant-garde. He worked across a variety of media, but is best known for his writings, as well as his work in the theatre and cinema. He had a profound influence on twentieth-century theatre through his conceptualization of the Theatre of Cruelty. Known for his raw, surreal and transgressive work, his texts explored themes from the cosmologies of ancient cultures, philosophy, the occult, mysticism and indigenous Mexican and Balinese practices.

Artaud's creative abilities were developed, in part, as a means of therapy during the artist's many hospitalizations for mental illness. His life and his work, despite the efforts of psychotherapy, reflected his mental afflictions and were further complicated by his dependence on narcotics. He sent his Surrealist poetry to the influential critic Jacques Rivière, thus beginning their long correspondence (included in the first volume of the Collected Works).

Artaud was disdainful of "bourgeois" classical theatre, panning the ordered plot and scripted language his contemporaries typically employed to convey ideas. His best-known work, THE THEATRE AND ITS DOUBLE (1938), contained manifestos of the "Theatre of Cruelty" which called for a primitive ceremonial communion between actor and audience in a magic exorcism; gestures, sounds, unusual scenery, and lighting combine to form a language, superior to words, that can be used to subvert thought and logic and to shock the spectator into seeing the baseness of his world.

Artaud's vision was a major influence on the Absurd theatre of Jean Genet, Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, and others and on the entire movement away from the dominant role of language and rationalism in contemporary theatre. Susan Sontag has asserted that his impact was "so profound that the course of all recent serious theater in Western Europe and the Americas can be said to divide into two periods – before Artaud and after Artaud."


Anchored by the four-volume edition of Artaud's COLLECTED WORKS (1968-1974), the following books are in PDF format unless otherwise noted:

* Artaud 1937 Apocalypse: Letters from Ireland [ed. Barber] (Diaphanes, 2019)
* Artaud Anthology [ed. Hirschman] (City Lights, 1965) – PDF^
* Artaud on Theatre [ed. Schumacher & Singleton] (Methuen, 2001)
* Artaud the Mômo [tr. Eshleman] (Diaphanes, 2020)
* The Cenci [tr. Taylor] (Grove, 1970) – PDF^
* Collected Works, 4 vols. [tr. Corti/Hamilton] (Calder & Boyars, 1968-1974) – PDF^
* The Death of Satan & Other Mystical Writings [tr. Hamilton/Corti] (Calder & Boyars, 1974)
* Heliogabalus or, the Crowned Anarchist [tr. Lykiard] (Creation, 2003) – ePUB + PDF^
* The Human Face & Other Writings [ed. Barber] (Diaphanes, 2022)
* The Monk [tr. Phillips] (Creation, 2003)
* The Peyote Dance [tr. Weaver] (FSG, 1976) – PDF^
* Selected Writings [ed. Sontag] (California, 1988) – PDF^
* The Theatre and Its Double [tr. Corti] (Calder, 2005)
* The Theater and Its Double [tr. Richards] (Grove, 1958)
* The Theatre and its Double [tr. Taylor-Batty] (Methuen, 2024) – ePUB + PDF
* Watchfiends & Rack Screams [tr. Eshleman/Bador] (Exact Change, 1995) – PDF^

PDF^ – courtesy of @Mohamed5438


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