The Arabian Nights in Historical Context

A new academic collection of essays on the Nights has been published by Oxford University Press.

It is quite expensive at about $100 but is also available via libraries. I've ordered a copy through my library's "Inter-library loan" system. If you aren't a student or university affiliated you can usually purchase a decently priced library membership at a local university which will typically allow you to access online academic databases and also let you borrow books through the host library and affiliated libraries.

Here is the link to the publisher's site and some information from the site about the book:


http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/LiteratureEnglish/WorldLiterature/Anthologies/?view=usa&ci=9780199554157

The Arabian Nights in Historical Context
Between East and West

Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum

ISBN13: 9780199554157
ISBN10: 0199554153
hardback, 300 pages Dec 2008, In Stock Price:$99.00 (06)

Description
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 Nuit s 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 afterlife in the contemporary Arabic novel.

Product Details
300 pages; 2 black-and-white halftones, musical samples;
ISBN13: 978-0-19-955415-7
ISBN10: 0-19-955415-3

Table of Contents
Introduction , Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum

1. Translation in the Contact Zone: Antoine Galland's Mille et une nuits: contes arabes , Madeleine Dobie

2. Cultivating the Garden: Antoine Galland's Arabian Nights in the Traditions of English Literature , Robert L. Mack

3. Playing the Second String: The Role of Dinarzade in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction , Ros Ballaster

4. Galland, Georgian Theater, and the Creation of Popular Orientalism , Bridget Orr

5. Christians in The Arabian Nights , Nabil Matar

6. White Women and Moorish Fancy in Eighteenth-Century Literature , Khalid Bekkaoui

7. William Beckford's Vathek and the Uses of Oriental Reenactment , Donna Landry

8. The peculiar character of the Arabian Tale: William Beckford and The Arabian Nights , James Watt

9. Coleridge and the Oriental Tale , Tim Fulford

10. The Adventure Chronotope and the Oriental Xenotrope: Galland, Sheridan, and Joyce Domesticate The Arabian Nights , Srinivas Aravamudan

11. Under the Spell of Magic: The Oriental Tale in Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade , Nasser Al-Taee

12. The Influence of The Arabian Nights on the Contemporary Arabic Novel , Maher Jarrar