The Arabian Nights In Contemporary World Cultures

A rich and nuanced study of the Arabian Nights in world cultures, analysing the celebration, appropriation, and translation of the stories over time.

This book focuses on debates and controversies around the Arabian Nights, which made significant cultural inroads throughout European cultures in 18th-19th century. The book analyzes modes and patterns of reading, response, engagement, commentary, translations, claims to authentication, abridgements, and illustrations.

Alf layla wa layla (known in English as A Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights) changed the world on a scale unrivalled by any other literary text. Inspired by a fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript, the appearance of Antoine Galland's twelve-volume Mille et Une Nuits in English translation (1704-1717), closely followed by the Grub Street English edition, drew the text into European circulation. Over the following three hundred years, a widely heterogeneous series of editions, compilations, translations, and variations circled the globe to reveal the absorption of The Arabian Nights into English, Continental, and global literatures, and its transformative return to modern Arabic literature, where it now enjoys a degree of prominence that it had never attained during the classical period. Beginning with a thorough introduction situating The Arabian Nights in its historical and cultural contexts-and offering a fresh examination of the text's multiple locations in the long history of modern Orientalism—this collection of essays by noted scholars from 'East', 'West', and in-between reassesses the influence of the Nights in Enlightenment and Romantic literature, as well as the text's vigorous after-life in the contemporary Arabic novel.

This book successfully defies the view that The Thousand and One Nights is not worthy of serious literary debate.

The most comprehensive treatment of the Arabian Nights ever published, with more than 800 detailed encyclopedic entries and a wealth of authoritative essays and resources. The tales of the Arabian Nights have long been the focus of scholarly research and critique, but no English language work has ever attempted an all-embracing treatment of them. The fruit of years of research, The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia is the first comprehensive reference work introducing both the Arabian Nights and the context of their genesis and aftermath in Near Eastern, European, and world culture. Editors Ulrich Marzolph, one of the world's foremost scholars of Near Eastern narrative culture, and Richard van Leeuwen, a prominent scholar of the Arabian Nights, present detailed, authoritative, and up-to-date research on virtually all aspects of the tales, including major protagonists, themes, important translations, textual history, adaptations, reworkings, works inspired by the Arabian Nights, and aspects of literary theory, and provide extensive bibliographies for each tale. In addition to the 800+ encyclopedic entries and numerous essays, the work introduces research that has not previously been published, making it an invaluable resource to scholars, educators, students, and the general public, as well as an essential addition to the core collection of academic and public libraries.

A lively discussion of the sexual life contained in the Arabian Nights, appealing to academics and general readers.

Scheherazade’s Children gathers together leading scholars to explore the reverberations of the tales of the Arabian Nights across a startlingly wide and transnational range of cultural endeavors. The contributors, drawn from a wide array of disciplines, extend their inquiries into the book’s metamorphoses on stage and screen as well as in literature—from India to Japan, from Sanskrit mythology to British pantomime, from Baroque opera to puppet shows. Their highly original research illuminates little-known manifestations of the Nights, and provides unexpected contexts for understanding the book’s complex history. Polemical issues are thereby given unprecedented and enlightening interpretations. Organized under the rubrics of Translating, Engaging, and Staging, these essays view the Nights corpus as a uniquely accretive cultural bundle that absorbs the works upon which it has exerted influence. In this view, the Arabian Nights is a dynamic, living and breathing cross-cultural phenomenon that has left its mark on fields as disparate as the European novel and early Indian cinema. While scholarly, the writers’ approach is also lively and entertaining, and the book is richly illustrated with unusual materials to deliver a sparkling and highly original exploration of the Arabian Nights’ radiating influence on world literature, performance, and culture.