Mirror of the Marvelous: The Surrealist Reimagining of Myth

A surrealist exploration of the marvelous in ancient, classic, and modern works from around the world • Long considered one of the most significant and original books to have come out of the surrealist movement • Reveals the “marvelous” in works from William Blake, Edgar Allen Poe, William Shakespeare, Chrétien de Troyes, and Arthur Rimbaud; legends and folktales from around the world; classics from Ovid, Plato, and Apuleius; Masonic ritual texts, Mesopotamia’s Epic of Gilgamesh, the Popol-Vuh, Lewis Caroll’s Alice through the Looking Glass, Solomon’s Song of Songs, and Goethe’s Faust First published in French as Miroir du merveilleux in 1940, Mirror of the Marvelous has long been considered one of the most significant and original books to have come out of the surrealist movement and Anaïs Nin suggested it as a source of inspiration, far ahead of its time. Drawing on sacred and modern texts that share a quality of the marvelous, Pierre Mabille defines “the marvelous” as the point at which inner and outer realities are joined and the individual is simultaneously one with himself and with the world, thus recovering the true sense of the sacred. He shows how “the marvelous” goes beyond simply being a synonym for “the fantastic” to engage the entire emotional realm.