The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity

Description

"This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life. Jan Ziolkowski tracks the poem from its medieval roots to its rediscovery in late nineteenth-century Paris, before its translation into English in Britain and the United States. The visual influence of the tale on Gothic revivalism and vice versa in America is carefully documented with lavish and inventive illustrations, and Ziolkowski concludes with an examination of the explosion of interest in The Juggler of Notre Dame in the twentieth century and its place in mass culture today. In this concluding volume, Ziolkowski explores the popularity of The Juggler of Notre Dame from the 1930s through the Second World War, especially in the Allied Resistance. Its popularity in the United States was subsequently maintained by figures as diverse as Tony Curtis and W. H. Auden, and although recently the story and medievalism have lost ground, the future of both holds promise. Presented with great clarity and simplicity, Ziolkowski's work is accessible to the general reader, while its many new discoveries will be valuable to academics in such fields and disciplines as medieval studies, medievalism, philology, literary history, art history, folklore, performance studies, and reception studies."

Description

Born into a distinguished aristocratic family of the old Habsburg Empire, Hermynia Zur Mühlen spent much of her childhood and early youth travelling in Europe and North Africa with her diplomat father. Never comfortable with the traditional roles women were expected to play, she broke as a young adult both with her family and, after five years on his estate in the old Czarist Russia, with her German Junker husband, and set out as an independent, free-thinking individual, earning a precarious living as a writer. She translated over 70 books from English, French and Russian into German, notably the novels of Upton Sinclair, which she turned into best-sellers in Germany; produced a series of detective novels under a pseudonym; wrote seven engaging and thought-provoking novels of her own, six of which were translated into English; contributed countless insightful short stories and articles to newspapers and magazines; and, having become a committed socialist, achieved international renown in the 1920s with her Fairy Tales for Workers? Children, which were widely translated including into Chinese and Japanese. Because of her fervent and outspoken opposition to National Socialism, she and her life-long Jewish partner, Stefan Klein, had to flee first Germany, where they had settled, and then, in 1938, her native Austria. They found refuge in England, where Zur Mühlen died, forgotten and virtually penniless, in 1951. This new, expanded edition contains: Zur Mühlen?s autobiographical memoir, The End and the Beginning; The editor?s detailed notes on the persons and events mentioned in the autobiography; A selection of Zur Mühlen?s short stories and two fairy tales; A synopsis of Zur Mühlen?s untranslated novel Our Daughters the Nazi Girls; An essay by the Editor on Zur Mühlen?s life and work; A bibliography of Zur Mühlen?s novels in English translation; A portfolio of selected illustrations of her work by George Grosz and Heinrich Vogeler; A free online supplement with additional original material

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Other Editions

• The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of ModernityOpen Book Publishers2018-01-01
• The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of ModernityOpen Book Publishers2018-01-01
• The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of ModernityOpen Book Publishers2018-01-01
• The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of ModernityOpen Book Publishers2018-01-01
• The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of ModernityOpen Book Publishers2018-01-01
• The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of ModernityOpen Book Publishers2019-01-01