The Arabian Nights in Historical Context

Between East and West

Saree Makdisi editor Felicity Nussbaum editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:13th Nov '08

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Arabian Nights in Historical Context cover

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.

The Arabian Nights in Historical Context showcases the range and quality of literary scholorship that the oriental tale is currently attracting... scholars of eighteenth-century and Romantic literature will find so much to interest them here, and this collection is also highly recommended to anyone involved in the continuing challenge of mapping out the wider cross-cultural influences of the Nights. * Laurence Williams, The Cambridge Quarterly *
The collection presented by Makdisi and Nussbaum shows how scholarship in the literary and cultural impact of the Thousand and on nights is advancing and becoming theororetically more sophisticated. * Richard van Leeuwen, University of Amsterdam *

ISBN: 9780199554157

Dimensions: 241mm x 161mm x 22mm

Weight: 741g

352 pages