I found this interesting musing on the excellent blog and online Nights resource Scheherazade's Web - http://dinarzade.blogspot.com/
It's an essay by Jack Ross on parodies of the Nights in Western literature and investigates even the nature of what parody is itself.
You can read the entire essay here - http://dinarzade.blogspot.com/2007/09/parodies-of-arabian-nights.html
"The Nights, in short, fight back - for if a parodist simply counterfeits the manner of the stories without rivalling their plots, then his critique inevitably draws fire. Thackeray, never strong in this respect, is forced to borrow a story from a German Orientalist; Dickens - whose satire is directed at British politics rather than the Arabian Nights themselves - contents himself with retelling the stories of the Merchant and the Genie, the talkative Barber and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Poe adds a new voyage to Sindbad’s seven (a favourite expedient - witness the 1970s’ film of The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, or John Barth’s Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor).
Of our mid-nineteenth-century group, only Twain and Meredith (and Théophile Gautier) invent their own plots. What is more, none of our authors are self-confident enough to see their stories succeeding where Scheherazade’s have failed. Gautier’s thousand-and-second night, supplied by him in Paris at the urging of the exhausted storyteller herself, proves insufficient to prevent her execution; Poe’s narrative positively provokes it; while both Thackeray and Dickens ignore the necessity for an ending. They become collaborators with the frame-story, rather than rivals to it (there is, in fact, a translation of the Nights which ends with just such a dénouement, the bored Sultan cutting off Scheherazade’s head.
One might sum up, then, by saying that while the enterprise of writing a parody of the Arabian Nights may, at first sight, seem a futile one, it obviously did not appear so to these authors - especially the ones who published their work and who thus presumably expected it to be read and enjoyed."
It's an essay by Jack Ross on parodies of the Nights in Western literature and investigates even the nature of what parody is itself.
You can read the entire essay here - http://dinarzade.blogspot.com/2007/09/parodies-of-arabian-nights.html
"The Nights, in short, fight back - for if a parodist simply counterfeits the manner of the stories without rivalling their plots, then his critique inevitably draws fire. Thackeray, never strong in this respect, is forced to borrow a story from a German Orientalist; Dickens - whose satire is directed at British politics rather than the Arabian Nights themselves - contents himself with retelling the stories of the Merchant and the Genie, the talkative Barber and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Poe adds a new voyage to Sindbad’s seven (a favourite expedient - witness the 1970s’ film of The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, or John Barth’s Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor).
Of our mid-nineteenth-century group, only Twain and Meredith (and Théophile Gautier) invent their own plots. What is more, none of our authors are self-confident enough to see their stories succeeding where Scheherazade’s have failed. Gautier’s thousand-and-second night, supplied by him in Paris at the urging of the exhausted storyteller herself, proves insufficient to prevent her execution; Poe’s narrative positively provokes it; while both Thackeray and Dickens ignore the necessity for an ending. They become collaborators with the frame-story, rather than rivals to it (there is, in fact, a translation of the Nights which ends with just such a dénouement, the bored Sultan cutting off Scheherazade’s head.
One might sum up, then, by saying that while the enterprise of writing a parody of the Arabian Nights may, at first sight, seem a futile one, it obviously did not appear so to these authors - especially the ones who published their work and who thus presumably expected it to be read and enjoyed."
