New Book by Dr. Ulrich Marzolph

I'm excited to announce a new book by the "Godfather" of 1001 Nights research, Professor Dr. Ulrich Marzolph (http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~umarzol/).

Dr. Marzolph's career has been instrumental in Nights research. He is the editor of the indispensible The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, The Arabian Nights Reader, and The Arabian Nights in Transnational Perspective. He is also the author of several books and scores of articles on the Nights.

His latest book is Ex Oriente Fabula:  Exploring the Narrative Culture of the Islamic Near and Middle East Part 3.

I've attached the table of contents below. Most all of the articles are Nights related.

You can order the book through the publisher, Verlag für Orientkunde, by emailing them – verlag.fuer.orientkunde@web.de

Here are the Table of Contents:

Galland’s Scheherazade and Mary Shelley’s 1831 Frankenstein

"'Have You Thought of a Story?':  “Have You Thought of a Story?”Galland’s Scheherazade and Mary Shelley’s 1831 Frankenstein" is an interesting 2005 article by Rebecca Nesvet which explores Shelley's debt to the Nights in creating her novel. 

Among the similarities are Shelley's use of the frame technique and also her inclusion of "Orientalist" motifs, including Safie the Turkish merchant's daughter and the female narrator in general. The article suggests in a sideways fashion, interestingly, that the novel could not have been written without Galland's Nights.

The article can be read here - https://www.academia.edu/28741925/_Have_you_thought_of_a_story_Gallands_Scheherazade_and_Mary_Shelleys_1831_frankenstein target="blank"

Article Abstract:

"Internal evidence from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its 1831 Introduction reveals Antoine Galland’s translation of the Arabian Nights as the source of many of the novel’s most significant themes and imagery. From Scheherazade’s legendary experience and her own, Shelley constructs a lineage of female survivalist storytellers crossing temporal, geographic, and cultural boundaries. For the text of Frankenstein Shelley appropriates the telescopic structure, the character of Safie, and several anecdotes and images. In her Introduction to the revised edition of 1831, Shelley more conspicuously emphasises the parallel with the Arabian Nights, reliving Scheherazade’s struggle and triumph when she takes up Byron’s intimidating storytelling challenge. Shelley’s use of Scheherazade’s stories and life story suggests that in her own perspective, to quote the Introduction, her “invention” of Frankenstein comes not “ex nihilo”, but out of Arabia."

-->

The Arabian Nights in the English Popular Press and the Heterogenization of Nationhood

Rasoul Aliakbari's new article "The Arabian Nights in the English Popular Press and the Heterogenization of Nationhood: A Print Cultural Approach to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities" explores nation-building via Anderson, Edward William Lane, the popular press and The 1001 Nights.

It's a great read and fills some much-needed gaps in terms of popular renditions of the Nights and their relationship with understandings of nation.

If you have academic access you can read it here at Canadian Review of Comparative Literature -

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/632227

Rasoul Aliakbari is a graduate student at The University of Alberta in Comparative Literature.

I've pasted the abstract/overview below -

I. Aims and Scope

This article investigates the popular print culture of the Arabian Nights¹ in nineteenth-century England in order to challenge Benedict Anderson’s standpoints on modern nation-building in his now-classic Imagined Communities. There is a growing body of research on the Nights, its sources, its literary character, its cultural significance, its translations, its adaptations, and its continuing popularity in contemporary cultures throughout the world. Ulrich Marzolph’s website provides an extensive list of representative scholarship on various aspects of the Nights in its various pre-modern, modern, and contemporary contexts (The Arabian Nights Bibliography). However, reviewing the literature of the Nights on his website and elsewhere, one notices a relative lack of scholarship on the uses of print editions of the Nights to converse with theories of print capitalism and modern nation-building. Responding to this lacuna, this article mainly aims to investigate publications of the Nights for lower-class readers in nineteenth-century England, in order to offer a heterogenized picture of the formation of modern English nationhood.² In particular, I will explore the print circumstances of Edward Lane’s translation of the Nights as well as some reproductions of, and responses to, the Nights in nineteenth-century British cheap popular periodicals, to develop a critical dialogue with Anderson.³ This dialogue includes revisiting, challenging, and complicating some dimensions of Anderson’s discourses on print capitalism, the formation of the modern nation as an imagined community, and official nationalism. By examining the uses of the Nights for and among British lower classes and the expanding bourgeois readership of the time, I will demonstrate that, unlike Anderson’s conception of nationhood as homogeneous, steady, and solid, the formation of modern English nationhood is heterogeneous, porous, borderly, and conditioned at the intersection of social classes and the oriental literariness of the Nights. In other words, rather than arguing for the impact of the Nights on European literary modernity or nation-building, this essay seeks to demonstrate some of the uses of this tale collection in the English enterprise of nation-building, including the dissemination of ‘wholesome’ reading matter and the establishment of British sovereignty over lower-class and mass readership in England during the nineteenth century.

A Thousand and One Nights: A History of the Text and its Reception by Dwight Reynolds

The West "discovers" the Nights

"A Thousand and One Nights: A History of the Text and its Reception" by Dwight Reynolds (http://www.religion.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/dwight-reynolds/) is, in my opinion, one of the most succinct – yet right on – histories of the Nights. It was only available before via academic libraries and is part of the volumes that make up Cambridge University Press' Arabic Literature series.

Professor Reynolds has uploaded a copy on academia for you to read/download here, however - https://www.academia.edu/28322004/A_Thousand_and_One_Nights_A_history_of_the_text_and_its_reception

I like the way the chapter successfully defines the Nights in a very clear, non polemic, manner, especially in its conclusion:

“The Nights was a relatively unknown collection of fabulous tales, one of many such collections that formed a part of late medieval popular Arabic literature, its unique embedding of tales and its compelling heroine notwithstanding.

By chance, this particular work was snatched from obscurity and given a new existence by Western scholars, translators, publishers and readers who acclaimed it both as a literary masterpiece and as a trustworthy guide to Middle Eastern cultures.”

And I love this too about the Nights, how random of a text from that time period it was to have been "chosen" and "discovered" by Western Orientalists like Galland and co. to become the penultimate representative of the Muslim and Arab world for the West. That's truth. And it's weird. And fascinating. 

The enduring lure of The Arabian Nights - Muhsin Al Musawi

This is a recent interview by Gulf News of (here very defensive sounding) Colombia Professor Muhsin Al Musawi on the Nights.

What is most interesting to me is Al Musawi's critique of what he sees as Western interference into the legacy of the culture of the Nights.

Excerpts below, entire interview (unfortunately with pop up ads and the like) here: http://gulfnews.com/culture/books/the-enduring-lure-of-the-arabian-nights-1.1876775

-------------------------------------

“The Arabian Nights” was largely ignored simply because it was not an elite piece of literature, and it wasn’t until the French (1704-12) and English (1706) translations were published that it was taken seriously. To tell the Arab intelligentsia how it was received by eminent poets, writers and essayists was not an ordinary matter, especially as this intelligentsia suffers from a Western dependency complex.

------------------------------------

You have a new project, almost ready: “The Arabian Nights: A Source Record”. The preliminary title suggests a lot but also seems to hide more.

I can quote from the introduction as it has not appeared yet, and I hope readers will use it with due acknowledgement to us as well as to the newspaper. This quote introduces the reader to early scholarly discussion of origins:

Aside from Edward William Lane’s (1801-76) enduring contribution to the sociological interest in the tales in its colonial dimension, his endeavour to establish a “sound” text, albeit with scriptural tone and style, still elicits scholarly interest. No less pertinent is the British periodical criticism of the years 1838-41, which, while highly informed by the British imperial quest, was mainly provoked by the latter’s significant achievement. It is only a sign of this encompassing imperial spirit that this criticism took into account German and French contributions to assimilate or debate within a broad colonial spectrum. While the evangelical spirit was bent on replacing Eastern cultures with that of the empire, the Orientalist was keen on preserving local traditions to ensure a better and solid acculturation beyond the vagaries of change.

Lane was no minor figure in this encounter, as his lexicon, studies of the “manners” of the Egyptians and translation of “The Thousand and One Nights” elicited further communications and interests. A case in point is the Athenaeum effort to elucidate the involved history of the “Nights”. Although taking into account contemporaneous views of de Sacy, von Hammer, Schlegel and Lane, the Athenaeum critic of the 1830s was fully aware of the pitfalls of basing final judgments regarding the date of composition on scattered references to historical events. No great value must be set on these allusions in a book that passed into many redactions and underwent a number of omissions, changes and interpolations. A “careful and critical examination of the tales,” he postulated, “would convince the reader that they were chiefly composed by illiterate persons, unacquainted with the history of their country; and it is unfair, therefore, to assume the accuracy of some particular date referred to, considering the numberless anachronisms contained in the work, and urge it as an argument either in favour or against opinions respecting the authorship, or age when written.”

Disapproving of Lane’s conclusion that the social and cultural setting points to an Egyptian origin, the reviewer observed that Islam regulates and models manners and customs in the whole Muslim East, establishing social conformity to which the “Nights” plainly attests. As for the very distinctive Egyptian traits, the reviewer urged that they be seen in the light of the tendency of copyists and compilers to impose their regional predilections on the text.

But what about the discussion of manuscripts, before Brill’s print of Galland’s Arabic manuscript?

Writing about manuscripts is a challenge, for no matter how authoritative and painstaking the search is, there are two sides to the question. One relates to availability of manuscripts, and the second to orality, transmission and storytelling. While Arabic scholarship was not enthusiastically drawn to popular culture, European scholarship was more interested in reading the tales as both manifestations of culture and life, as they deemed, and as indices of the spirit and language varieties of the region. Hence the interest in origin.

The Athenaeum reviewer was not alone; but his recapitulations were in response to an ongoing discussion that received further impetus after the publication of Lane’s annotated edition. Lane was keen on establishing that the work was by one single author who composed it between 1475 and 1525 (preface to “The Arabian Nights Entertainments”, London, 1839-41). Silvestre de Sacy had already dwelt on this issue (as documented by Chauvin and Littmann) in “Journal des savants”, 1817, 678; “Recherches sur l’Origine du Recueil des Contes Intitules les Mille et Une Nuits”, Paris, 1829; and in the “Memoires de l’Academie des Inscriptions & Belles-Lettres”, x, 1833, 30.

In these interventions de Sacy debated both single authorship and connectedness with Persian and Indian collections, dismissing the early reference by Al Masudi (336/947, re-edited in 346/957) as spurious. Just opposite to these views were Joseph von Hammer’s (“Wiener Jahrbücher”, 1819, 236; JA, 1e serie, x; 3e serie, viii; preface to his “Die noch Nicht übersetzten Erzaehlungen”) where he built his argument on Al Masudi, stressing therefore the genuineness of this as evidence of a collection of non-Arab origin.

Bruce Fudge - "More Translators of The Thousand and One Nights"

 Borges (1968) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges

Bruce Fudge on the continued legacy of Borges' judgements and predictions about the variety of translations of the Nights and the latest contemporary "Western" translations of the story collection.

" Obviously, much has changed since Borges’ day, not least the status of the Encyclopaedia  Britannica. We no longer want (consciously, anyway) to find Shakespeare or Flaubert in our translations from the Arabic. But in a sense, the twenty-first-century versions are heeding Borges’ critique. They, too, are only conceivable “in the wake of a literature.” The difference is that the new translations must be conceived in the wake of an Arabic literature.

It is true that the Penguin translation has a Spartan quality akin to the German of Littmann, as other reviewers have noted. But this quality is itself a result of a deep engagement with the Arabic text. One is never far from the original with Lyons, and as I have suggested, reading him is perhaps the closest to reading Calcutta II or Būlāq. The Pléiade edition is richer. This is most evident from the notes and critical apparatus that show both the translators’ deep command of the Arabic literary tradition and their evident passion for The Thousand and One Nights as a part of that tradition. None is particularly concerned with their readers’ own backgrounds: the assumption is that the reader, too, seeks authenticity. Perhaps in the next century scholars will look back and marvel at the priority of text over reader, but for the time being, both Penguin and Pléiade fit the current Zeitgeist."

His article - "More Translators of The Thousand and One Nights" from the Journal of the American Oriental Society can be read here:

https://www.academia.edu/24654499/More_Translators_of_The_Thousand_and_One_Nights_JAOS_136_2016_135-146

Muhsin Al-Musawi - The Popular Memory of the Societies of the Thousand and One Nights

A new book was published on the historical context of the 1001 Nights in Abbasid Baghdad. It is in Arabic (الذاكرة الشعبية لمجتمعات ألف ليلة وليلة) and has been given the English title of The Popular Memory of the Societies of the Thousand and One Nights.

More information below:

From http://www.columbia.edu/cu/mesaas/faculty/:

"Columbia University Professor Muhsin al-Musawi's latest book, The Popular Memory of the Societies of the Thousand and One Nights, is published by Al-Markaz al-Thaqafi al-Arabi press.

The book expounds on and develops al-Musawi's early research on and criticism of the social and cultural aspect of medieval and Abbasid life, and discusses the nature of narrative techniques that evolved then in relation to poetry, historiography, geography, topography, and the akhbar genre. Please have a look at the front and back covers for more information."

From al-Musawi:

"The Popular Memory  of the Societies  of the Thousand and  One Nights (Beirut: Al-Markaz al-Thaqafi al-Arabi, 2016), 600pp. ISBN  978-9953-68-808-4.

The book expands on and develops my early research on  and criticism  of the social and cultural aspect of medieval and Abbasid life,  and discusses the nature of narrative techniques that  evolved then in relation to poetry, historiography, geography, topography, and  the akhbar genre."

Here is the cover and back page:

Muhsin Al-Musawi The Popular Memory of the Societies of the Thousand and One Nights

Arabic manuscripts of the Thousand and One Nights

Arabic manuscripts of the Thousand and One Nights is a new book recently published by Harback, Directed by Aboubakr Chraïbi.

I've uploaded the book's information on Scribd below along with its table of contents.

The field of Nights studies concerned with Arabic manuscripts of the work has long been missing a comprehensive, updated bibliography and overview of these manuscripts. As such it will be a vital resource for Nights scholarship, particularly as that scholarship continues to take a more global and comparative view of the story collection.

Arabic manuscripts of the Thousand and One Nights by mjlundell

Albiblio - Egyptian Nights Database

 picture of restaurant in Sharm el-Sheikh from www.sharmsmile.com/

Rasoul Aliakbari has compiled an excellent resource for 1001 Nights folks. It's Albiblio, a website devoted to everything about Egyptian manifestations of the Nights and is a treasure of online resources.

Here is the link - http://albiblio.net/

From the website: "Given the scarcity and dispersal of materials on the Egyptian book history of One Thousand and One Nights, Albiblio website mainly aims to present copies of the Nights that have appeared in print in Egypt. In addition, Albiblio will contain contemporary responses as well as scholarly research about this corpus. Aiming to be comprehensive, this project is evolving and testifies to the vibrant presence of the Nights in modern Egyptian literature and culture. The information is derived from OCLC Worldcat, Index Islamicus, Index Arabicus, and correspondence with major Middle Eastern libraries among other sources. The compiler welcomes criticism and feedback as well as suggestions to be added to the bibliographies."

more citations of this blog

In my field blogs generally are thought to mean time wasted not publishing in "legitimate" journals - this is understandable even though there are so many high quality academic online creations. It's unfortunate too, for many reasons outside the scope of this post. 

My blog is useful for me for gathering all of the Nights related materials I almost always randomly come across. It has been a constant inspiration for my legitimate publications and useful in my teaching. It has also been a place of global collaboration of all things Nights-esque. It's fairly safe to say that the role of a blog in the academy, however, remains far under the scope of legitimacy.

The MLA though, among other groups, has started to include digital humanities criteria for judging whether things like a blog are worthwhile. It has yet to catch on at any substantial level. The future, however, is certainly bright for the growth and centralization of online resources serving the humanities.

You can find MLA guidelines for evaluating digital work here - http://www.mla.org/guidelines_evaluation_digital

My blog has been cited in several peer reviewed academic writings and now a book from folklorist Christina Bacchilega (it might not seem like much but there are estimations that most peer-reviewed humanities articles are only cited 10% of the time – this article suggests 93% of humanities articles remain uncited anywhere else - alex-reid.net/2011/03/on-the-value-of-academic-blogging.html).

Here is the passage from the book –

            “The fact that websites are doing more than providing a wealth of folktale and fairy-tale primary texts to those who can access the Internet is further brought home by the multiplying of online publications, like the English-language Cabinet de Fees and Fairy Tale Review (both of which have issues also available in print); discussion forums such as SurLaLune’s, which in the October 2000-June 2011 period had 3,761 average visits per day and 23,391 total posts on over six hundred different topics; blogs, including Breezes from Wonderland by Harvard-based fairy-tale scholar Maria Tatar and the one Michael Lundell has maintained since 2007, The Journal of [the] 1001 Nights; and Facebook groups like Fairy Tale Films Research” (10).

Bacchilega, Christina. Fairy Tales Transformed?:  Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder. Detroit:  Wayne State UP, 2013.

Here is a complete list of other mentions, elsewhere, of this blog -

http://journalofthenights.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-journal-of-1001-nights-in-media.html
 

Tales Through Time: The Incredible Journey of The 1001 Nights

I'll be giving a 1001 Nights lecture/presentation at the new San Diego Public Library this Wednesday evening. Please come!

Facebook event - https://www.facebook.com/events/878628298819845/

"Tales Through Time: The Incredible Journey of The 1001 Nights"

Professor Michael Lundell discusses the origins, significance, and lasting influence of one the great works of world culture, “One Thousand and One Nights” (aka “The Arabian Nights”), the collection of stories and folktales compiled during the Islamic Golden Age. Take a magic carpet ride with Scheherazade, Aladdin, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and Sindbad the Sailor.

When: Wednesday, May 21, 2014 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Where: Central Library / Mary Hollis Clark Conference Room 151 330 Park Blvd., San Diego, CA 92101

Part of the Muslim Journeys project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Arabian Nights Bibliography Updated

I received this update on a listserv I am a member of and would like to share it. It's an exceptional online bibliography, now updated, with Nights related articles/books and etc., in several languages.


"This is to inform you that the Arabian Nights Bibliography, available online since several years, has recently been substantially updated.

http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~enzmaer/arabiannights-engl-elektr.html

As a further service to the scholarly community, we now offer to supply scans of items listed in the Bibliography, most of which are available here.

In the future, we aim to link pdf-scans to specific out-of-copyright items.

As always, any suggestions to make the Bibliography (and our service) better will be greatly appreciated.

Best regards, UM

Prof. Dr. Ulrich Marzolph"

1001 Nights in the World Literary Imagination - Boston University

 

A Tale of 1001 Nights by Gustave Boulanger

Professor Margaret Litvin (http://www.bu.edu/mlcl/profile/margaret-litvin/) is teaching her Nights course again (she taught a similar course last Fall) at Boston University.

You should follow their blog, it has student and group work and presentations, and is an excellent, updated resource on the Nights and on teaching the Nights -

http://1001nightsatbu.wordpress.com/

Stephen Arata - On E. W. Lane’s Edition of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, 1838

 Edward William Lane

Here is a good historical overview of the Nights with a concentration on Edward William Lane's version, a version well known but relatively understudied.

 http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=stephen-arata-on-e-w-lanes-edition-of-the-arabian-nights-entertainments-1838

Arata, Stephen. “On E. W. Lane’s Edition of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, 1838.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web


"Lane had little use for, and even less patience with, Galland’s edition. Large stretches of his “Translator’s Preface” are devoted to enumerating his predecessor’s shortcomings as a translator and his consequent distortions of the source material. Lane’s slighting dismissal of “the version which has so long amused us” (vii) signals his desire to lift the tales out of the realm of mere entertainment, where they had so long resided. For Lane, “what is most valuable in the original work” is “its minute accuracy with respect to those peculiarities which distinguish the Arabs from every other nation, not only of the West, but also of the East” (viii). It had long been the most banal of commonplaces to claim that The Arabian Nights provided a “window on the East,” but this is not what Lane means. Virtually alone among readers, then or since, Lane believed that The Arabian Nights in its Bulaq version was the work of a single author who lived around 1500, most likely in Cairo. While many of the tales are “doubtless of an older origin,” they were all “remodelled, so as to become pictures of the state of manners which existed among the Arabs, and especially among those of Egypt,” in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (xiii-xiv). Lane asserts not only that The Arabian Nights is, rather than a miscellany, instead the product of a single shaping intelligence, but that it therefore provides an accurate, detailed, and thoroughly consistent account of Cairene life. For Lane, The Arabian Nights is to be valued for the abundant and precise documentary evidence it gives of the manners and customs and material life of Egypt. Since, in Lane’s view, those manners and customs and that material life had remained more or less unchanged since at least the sixteenth century, The Arabian Nights was more than merely an historical record."

Ella Shohat on The Thief of Bagdad

Here is film scholar Ella Shohat speaking briefly about The Thief of Bagdad (1940)

1001 Nights in Paris

The Institut du monde arabe in Paris is holding a Nights-themed exhibit through April of 2013.

From AFP: http://www.france24.com/en/20121126-1001-nights-cast-spell-paris-expo

"AFP - Full of flying carpets, genies, love and battle, a Paris show opening Tuesday lifts the curtain on "One Thousand and One Nights", exploring the roots of the folk tales and their powerful influence in the West.

Through some 350 manuscripts, artworks, artefacts and film clips, the show at the Arab World Institute traces the tales' journey from their origin in Indian and Persian folkore, to their translation into Arabic in the eighth century.

And it highlights how the French Orientalist Antoine Galland brought the "Nights" to Western audiences in 1704, translating a manuscript of 35 original tales, and weaving in 35 others gleaned from his studies of the region."

-----------

"A Pablo Picasso sketch and an abstract painting by Rene Magritte feature among the many representations of the beguiling beauty at the heart of "The Arabian nights", as the tales are sometimes known in the English-speaking world.

"Scheherazade remains for many a symbol of the emancipating power of speech, of knowledge's triumph over tyranny and a woman's courage in the face of injustice," write the curators.
The show also notes, however, that some modern feminists blame the figure of Scheherazade for perpetuating a narrow vision of women in the Arab world.

Wood-and-bone doors from 15th century Egypt or Syria, or a tiny glazed ceramic oil lamp from ninth-century Egypt -- intend to recreate the setting of the tales, between the great cities of Baghdad, Damascus or Cairo.

And visitors can settle into a listening booth to hear one of 15 tales, or catch a clip from one of 12 movies inspired by the "Nights", from the 1924 "The Thief of Baghdad" with Douglas Fairbanks to Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1974 version."


Their website (in French) - http://www.imarabe.org/

Check out their youtube site as well for commercials about the events - http://www.youtube.com/imarabe

Jorge Luis Borges - El Libro de las mil y una noches

Longtime Nights admirer and writer who can hold his own just fine Jorge Luis Borges speaks about El Libro de las mil y una noches. This 40+ minute recording is part of a series of lectures he gave on literature in 1977 (en Spanish):

1001 Nights in the World Literary Imagination - Boston University

Margaret Litvin at Boston University is currently teaching a Nights-based course.

The class has a blog/website with a ton of student responses and papers that are interesting and well considered.

You can find it here: http://1001nightsatbu.wordpress.com/

Michael Lundell's "Pasolini's Splendid Infidelities"

I humbly announce the publication of my article "Pasolini's Splendid Infidelities:  Un/Faithful Film Versions of The Thousand and One Nights" in the Journal Adaptation:  The Journal of Literature On Screen Studies.

Here is a link to the article:  http://adaptation.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/aps022?ijkey=KzP5cPrkMEUQBZA&keytype=ref

And here is the abstract:

"This article argues that Pasolini’s 1974 film Il fiore delle mille e una notte seems to be the most faithful adaptation, in its emphasis on sexuality, of The 1001 Nights in its oldest form. This success is surprising and possibly inadvertent but it presents a potentially measurable connection between the written and filmic Nights. By comparing Il fiore’s ending with three other potential ‘Nights films’ the article suggests a more flexible approach to adaptation studies, posits the existence of a fundamental identity of the Nights, and places Pasolini’s emphasis on sexuality into the context of the oldest manuscript of the Nights."

Thanks so much to everyone who was a part of this creation, in particular my chair and mentor Alain J.-J. Cohen at UCSD.

Paul Nurse reviews Marina Warner

The Globe and Mail has recently published a new review of Marina Warner's Nights book Stranger Magic.  The review is written by Paul Nurse, author of Eastern Dreams:  How the Arabian Nights Came to the World, a fine history of the Nights.

Here is the link to the review, excerpts are pasted below: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/why-has-the-arabian-nights-proved-so-enduring/article4480676/

"Review: Non-fiction

Why has The Arabian Nights proved so enduring?

Reviewed by Paul McMichael Nurse

Special to The Globe and Mail

Published Tuesday, Aug. 14 2012, 2:59 PM EDT
Last updated Tuesday, Aug. 14 2012, 3:04 PM EDT

Like a literary phoenix, the One Thousand and One Nights – first printed in English, in 1706, as The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment – has surpassed time, culture, changing fashion and even controversy to maintain a position among the world’s premier imaginative works. A compendium of stories from India, Persia, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Turkey and possibly even Greece and Rome, some tales date back at least 1,100 years, others are of relatively recent vintage, but all are tied together by a simple framing device in which a young woman recites stories to ransom her life and the lives of other women from the misogyny of a disturbed eastern king. In the end, she restores the king’s sanity, saving herself and her countrywomen.

---------------------------------------------
 

But what is it about the Nights that has proved so enduring when other popular works have come and gone? Even given the famous Enlightenment preoccupation with oriental modes and themes, the Nights continues to project the image of a mythical medieval world well into the third millennium. British writer and mythographer Marina Warner believes that the presence of magic in many of these tales is key to understanding the collection’s appeal. Of course, not every story in the Nights has an element of the supernatural about it, but enough tales revolve around magical elements that The Arabian Nights’ world has become synonymous with an alternative reality; in Warner’s words, a place “packed with wonders, elastic in handling time and space, and plotted according to the different laws of fate and magic.”

Certainly there is hardly an aspect of western culture that hasn’t been affected by the Nights. With so much material to work from, Warner is obliged to pick and choose her discussion areas. She retells 15 stories in 20 chapters as springboards for an examination of the myriad aspects of the work – considerations of the One Thousand and One Nights in history, pastiche, theatre, dance, film or what-have-you. Throw in bits of personal biography, a nod to the two Gulf Wars and the Arab Spring, and the result is a text that is largely comprehensive, even if it sometimes careens from subject to subject like a runaway magic carpet.

My chief complaint is that, despite Warner’s wide-ranging perspective, there remains a lopsided approach to Stranger Magic that means some significant expressions of the Arabian Nights receive short shrift. Since her chief concern is with cultural history via magical representations, the reader cannot be too critical of her choices, but some omissions remain curious. German animator Lotte Reiniger’s admittedly charming silhouette film The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) receives an entire chapter, and the possibly bogus pastiche story Aladdin almost as many pages, but the Nights’ thorny history in the Arab world – many would like it banned – receives little attention.

Likewise, the symbolic meaning of the beautiful eastern carpet draped on Sigmund Freud’s couch (yes, that couch) is discussed at length, but not enough consideration beyond “name” writers like William Beckford and Voltaire is given to the celebrated “Oriental Tale” genre of the 18th and early 19th centuries – hundreds upon hundreds of works that suffused western literature with faux-eastern stories, influencing European letters for more than 150 years.

In such a terrifically expansive subject, however, this might be considered nitpicking. Poised midway between a dense academic text and a broadly selective overview of a timeless literary treasure, Warner’s massive work remains a powerful testimony to the enduring appeal of the 1,001 Nights. Complex, frequently subtle and sometimes unwieldy, her book will reward readers with sophisticated insights into the cultural exchange between West and East – a bit like The Arabian Nights itself.

Paul McMichael Nurse is the author of Eastern Dreams, a popular history of One Thousand and One Nights."