The Dada movement, revered as perhaps the purest form of cultural subversion and provocation in 20th-centry Europe, has been a victim of the readiness with which cultural historians have swallowed its own propaganda. Based on extensive close analysis of French-language Dada work in its original form, and offering English translations throughout, this major reappraisal looks at a broad range of media and topics - including poetry, film, philosophy, and quantum physics - in order to get beyond Dada's typecasting as avant-garde anti-hero. Work by women writers and other marginalized figures combines with that of canonical Dadaists to present Dada in a radically new set of guises: poetic and textually subtle: intellectually and philosophically meaningful; peaceable and quasi-Buddhist; and perhaps most uncomfortably of all, conformist and reactionary. Book jacket.