The Thousand And One Nights In Arabic Literature And Society

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

The Arab world's greatest folk stories re-imagined by the acclaimed Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh, published to coincide with the world tour of a magnificent musical and theatrical production directed by Tim Supple

A luminous translation of Arabic tales of enchantment and wonder Translated into English for the very first time, A Hundred and One Nights is a marvelous example of the rich tradition of popular Arabic storytelling. Like the celebrated Thousand and One Nights, this collection opens with the frame story of Scheherazade, the vizier’s gifted daughter who recounts imaginative tales night after night in an effort to distract the murderous king from taking her life. A Hundred and One Nights features an almost entirely different set of stories, however, each one more thrilling, amusing, and disturbing than the last. Here, we encounter tales of epic warriors, buried treasure, disappearing brides, cannibal demon-women, fatal shipwrecks, and clever ruses, where human strength and ingenuity play out against a backdrop of inexorable, inscrutable fate. Distinctly rooted in Arabic literary culture and the Islamic tradition, these tales draw on motifs and story elements that circulated across cultures, including Indian and Chinese antecedents, and features a frame story possibly older than its more famous sibling. This vibrant translation of A Hundred and One Nights promises to transport readers, new and veteran alike, into its fantastical realms of magic and wonder.

Almost three centuries have passed since the oldest manuscript of "The Thousand and One Nights" arrived in Europe. Since then, the "Nights" have occupied the minds of scholars world-wide, in particular the questions of origin, composition, language and literary form. In this book, Muhsin Mahdi, whose critical edition of the text brought so much praise, explores the complex literary history of the "Nights," bringing to fruition the search for the archetype that constituted the core of the surviving editions, and treating the fascinating story of the growth of the collection of stories that we now know as "The Thousand and One Nights,"

The essays in this volume scrutinize the expanse of sources for The Arabian Nights or The Thousand and One Nights in all of their static and dynamic complexity. They follow the trajectory of the Nights’ texts, the creative, scholarly commentaries, artistic encounters and relations to science.

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

The Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz refashions the classic tales of Scheherazade into a novel written in his own imaginative, spellbinding style. Here are genies and flying carpets, Aladdin and Sinbad, Ali Baba, and many other familiar stories from the tradition of The One Thousand and One Nights, made new by the magical pen of the acknowledged dean of Arabic letters, who plumbs their depths for timeless truths.