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

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."
 

Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights By Marina Warner Chatto

A new book has emerged from the UK, written by Marina Warner (http://www.marinawarner.com), a Professor at The University of Essex and noted author.

Below is a review from the Guardian. Here is a link to it: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/11/stranger-magic-marina-warner-review.

It's a big (400+ page) book, I'm looking forward to taking a look at it.

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"Stranger Magic by Marina Warner – review
Marina Warner has written a scholarly dissection of the Arabian Nights

• Robin Yassin-Kassab
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 November 2011 17.55 EST
•

The Arabian Nights constitute, in Marina Warner's words, "a polyvocal anthology of world myths, fables and fairytales". The antecedents of these Arab-Islamic texts (also known as The Thousand and One Nights and the Arabian Nights Entertainments) are Qur'anic, Biblical, Indian, Persian, Mesopotamian, Greek, Turkish and Egyptian. In them, oral and written traditions, poetry and prose, demotic folk tales and courtly high culture mutate and interpenetrate. In their long lifetime the Nights have influenced, among many others, Flaubert, Wilde, Márquez, Mahfouz, Elias Khoury, Douglas Fairbanks and the Ballets Russes.

The framing story, in which Shahrazad saves her life by telling King Shahryar tall tales, is only one such ransom recounted in the tales. More than simple entertainment, then: throughout these stories within stories, and stories about stories, narrative even claims for itself the power to defer death. Although oral versions of the Nights long percolated through Europe (elements turning up in Chaucer, Ariosto, Dante and Shakespeare), the tales were established in the mainstream of European popular and literary culture with Galland's early 18th-century French translation. Galland purged the eroticism and homosexuality, added tales from the dictation of a Lebanese friend, and perhaps invented the two best-known and seemingly most "Arabian" tales of all: "Aladdin and the Magic Lamp" and "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves".

Warner quotes Jorge Luis Borges (a guiding spirit in her book) approving this belle infidèle approach to translation. "I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else." It's this changing aspect of the Nights as a time-travelling, trans-civilisational cooperation that fascinates Warner. She sees in it "a unique key to the imaginary processes that govern the symbolism of magic, foreignness and mysterious power in modern culture".

Stranger Magic, influenced by the work of Edward Said, is an endeavour to uncover "a neglected story of reciprocity and exchange". One of Warner's central intentions is to show that while Christendom and Islam were politically and religiously in a state of hot or cold war, science, philosophy and art recognised no frontiers. Yet this openness closed somewhat from the Enlightenment on, when Europe sealed magic off from science, imagination from reason, and also east from west. The Enlightenment, of course, was the point at which the Nights was translated to such rapturous European reception, and not by accident. The "home-grown practice of, and belief in, magic was set aside to be replaced by foreign magic – stranger magic, much easier to disown, or otherwise hold in intellectual or political quarantine".

So to the orientalisms of Edward Lane and Richard Burton's English translations, which not only presented the medieval fantastic as a documentary resource for understanding the "unchanging" and now colonially subjected Arab culture of the 19th century, but also projected on to the exotic foreign screen fantasies and fears that would have been taboo in a domestic context. Burton famously re-sexualised the tales with his own copious notes on the east's supposed perversions.

Stranger Magic is an enormous work, 436 densely erudite and eclectic pages plus another hundred of glossaries and notes. In its relentless connecting up of diverse stories, from the Inferno to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, it's reminiscent of Christopher Booker's brick-sized Seven Basic Plots. Warner's chapters, allocated into five parts, are beautifully illustrated and interspersed with 15 tales concisely retold.

Part one focuses on the jinn (or genies) – who behave, like the Greek gods, badly, capriciously, illogically – and also on the figure of Solomon, a master of the jinn in his Islamic version, here located in the white wizard tradition somewhere between Gilgamesh, Merlin, Prospero and Gandalf. It includes one of the book's many delightful discoveries: a 14th-century Syrian treatise on the legal status of jinn-human marriages.

The second part attends to the Arab and European habit of attributing foreignness to evil magicians. These dark enchanters come from dark places (Africa and India) and profess dark (pre-Islamic) faiths. During the Enlightenment, black magic became inevitably dark skinned; necromancy became inseparable from "nigromancy".
Warner also examines how the stories "test the border between persons and things" and how severed heads that speak, books that kill and carpets which fly can be linked to the objects of our modern world – not only cinema's animations but also the prosthetic goods of everyday life, the designer labels, gadgets and vehicles by which we project and define our personalities.

Warner moves from considering the derivations and meanings of the word "talisman" to reflect on her own attachment to talismans in her Catholic girlhood (her personal appearances in the book are apt, easing the academic tone) before launching into a fascinating discussion of the talismanic properties of paper money.

There is much on writerly responses to the Nights, including Voltaire's contes, Goethe's "East-West Divan", and (a great chapter) the neglected Gothic novelist and Islamophile William Beckford. The book ends with an examination of flight, cinema, shadow play and Freud. Warner describes the Hampstead cave of wonders that was Freud's final consulting room, "a darkling mirror of the furnishings of his mind", and the iconic analytical couch draped in oriental cushions and rugs. Specifically a Ghashgha'i tribal rug, which leads by glorious digression to Mohsen Makhmalbaf's rug-themed Iranian film Gabbeh, and to a reminder that oriental rugs, the Nights and psychoanalysis are all narrative forms.

Stranger Magic is a scholarly work that often reads like a fireside conversation. It's encyclopediac, a book to be savoured in slices, yet (inevitably) it's easy to think of further potential topics – giants, for instance, or dervishes, or magical realism from the Arabs via La Mancha to the Latin American boom. But Warner's conclusion reminds us of her organising principle: the uses of enchantment to open new possibilities of thought and sympathy – the necessity of magic, especially in a self-consciously "rational", secular world.

•Robin Yassin-Kassab's The Road from Damascus is published by Penguin."

new review of Paul Nurse's Eastern Dreams

Here is an excerpt of a new review of Paul McMichael Nurse's Nights book Eastern Dreams:  How the Arabian Nights Came to the World (2010).

The review is by Maria Tatar of Harvard.  She writes a lot about the history of the Nights as well as mentioning the book.

Here is the link:  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/eastern-dreams-by-paul-mcmichael-nurse/article2123216/

Excerpt:

"The daily review, Tues., Aug. 9

A cross-cultural classic by committee

Maria Tatar

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

Published Tuesday, Aug. 09, 2011 12:01AM EDT

"Voltaire dismissed the Arabian Nights as “senseless stories that mean nothing,” but many other writers have found in the collection a golden well of inspiration. 

Charles Dickens and William Wordsworth read the tales when they were young and treasured them into adulthood. Edgar Allan Poe was so intoxicated by their sorcery that he wrote The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade. O. Henry alluded to them repeatedly in such tales as A Night in New Arabia and A Bird of Bagdad. And Stephen King created in his novel Misery a latter-day Scheherazade in the person of Paul Sheldon, who (re)writes a story to save his life.

In the words of Jorge Luis Borges, the Arabian Nights has become a work so vast that “it is not necessary to have read it.”"

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

"Eastern Dreams brilliantly maps the massively complex, culturally fraught and highly contested history of a collection that exists only in versions of itself. What is referred to collectively as Arabian Nights’ Entertainments has at its core a lost Persian storybook called Hazar Afsanah, which consisted mainly of tales imported from India. Once translated into Arabic, in the eighth or ninth centuries, it received the title Alf Khurafa (A Thousand Stories) but was later referred to as Alf Laila (A Thousand Nights). By the late 12th century, with the addition of stories from Middle Eastern countries, the collection flourished as Alf Laila wa Laila (A Thousand Nights and One Night), becoming the source material for the first Western translation."

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

"Eastern Dreams reminds us of the racing energy of story. The collection may be contained by a frame story, but it knows no boundaries. Ameba-like, it moves across cultures and centuries, absorbing new material as it is translated and transculturated. In the West, it has become a repository not only of Eastern tales but also of what Nurse calls “Western thought, perception and popular fiction concerning the Muslim East.” Oxygenated rather than depleted by each new cultural contact, The Thousand and One Nights reminds us that stories are infinitely expansive.

To be sure, there are many elements of imperial appropriation, cultural misunderstanding and racial stereotyping in the story of the collection and its international fortunes. But that is a story different from the one Nurse tells. In his reading, the stories have become a “co-operative product of both East and West – practically the only classic of world literature that has developed through the efforts of two cultures that are sometimes at violent odds with one another.”

Maria Tatar is the author of Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood and The Annotated Brothers Grimm. She chairs the Program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University."

 

Visions of the Jinn - Robert Irwin

From 1001 Nights

Robert Irwin has a new Nights book out called Visions of the Jinn that looks to shed some promising light on an under-covered topic.  The book is a bit pricey, 120 pounds, but looks to be a hardback oversized coffee table type book, making its price a bit more reasonable. 

Many thanks to Paul and Professor Z for passing this along.

Here is the Guardian's review, well more like a press release since it's also written by Irwin, with an excerpt pasted below.  It's well worth the read for its overview of the general history of illustrators of the Nights.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/12/arabian-nights-illustration


"Things changed with the publication in 1839-41 of Edward William Lane's The Thousand and One Nights in three volumes. Unlike earlier English translators, Lane, who had spent years in Egypt, translated not from Galland's French, but directly from the Arabic. Lane intended his translation to have an improving, didactic purpose and he seems to have thought of it as a kind of supplement to his pioneering work of ethnography, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). He thought that the stories of the Nights could serve as an introduction to everyday life in the Middle East. (Never mind about the flying horse, the jinn, the Roc, the magic lamp and the Old Man of the Sea.) His copious endnotes furthered his didactic aim and so did the illustrations. William Harvey, a pupil of Thomas Bewick and one of Britain's leading engravers, did the boxwood engravings, but Lane stood at his shoulder, checking the look of things and providing previously published engravings of Egyptian and Moorish architecture for him to copy. In general, the purpose of the pictures was not to stimulate the imagination or supplement the storyline, but to introduce the British reader to the authentic look of the Arab world. Just occasionally Harvey was licensed to use his imagination, as with his marvellous depiction of the giant jinni in "The Story of the City of Brass", or the battle of magical transformations in "The Story of the Second Dervish".

Dalziel's Illustrated Arabian Nights Entertainments, published in 1865, was the most spectacular illustrated edition to be published in the Victorian age. A number of famous artists were commissioned to produce pictures for it, including John Tenniel, John Everett Millais and George Pinwell. But Arthur Boyd Houghton, a less well-known illustrator, produced the most compelling and atmospheric images – masterpieces of Victorian book illustration. Although his pictures have an authentic oriental look, the orient they conjure up owes more to India than the Arab world, for Houghton had spent his childhood in India and had relatives in the Indian army.

Though selections of the Nights whose texts were designed to be read by children had been published from the late 18th century onwards, little thought had been given to what sort of illustrations might appeal to children. Walter Crane (1845-1915) was one of the first to illustrate stories from the Nights in colour and also one of the first to consider the visual tastes of children: "Children, like ancient Egyptians, appear to see things in profile, and like definite statements in design. They prefer well-designed forms and bright frank colour. They don't want to bother with three dimensions. They can accept symbolic representations. They themselves employ drawing . . . as a kind of picture writing and eagerly follow a pictured story." Crane did not merely illustrate books; he designed them in such a way that there would be a perfect match between text and image. His Aladdin's Picture Book (1876) is ravishing and, since Aladdin's story is, however notionally, set in China, he drew on Chinese and Japanese imagery.

Lane's translation of the Nights, while certainly scholarly, had been excessively prudish, as Lane excised stories and incidents with erotic content. When Richard Burton produced his translation from the Arabic in 10 volumes with six supplementary volumes (1885-8), he went to the opposite extreme and not only kept the sex scenes in but exaggerated them, and he produced extensive notes on such matters as homosexuality, bestiality and castration. The first edition of Burton's translation, which was published for subscribers only so as to lessen the danger of being prosecuted for obscenity, had no pictures, but soon after his death in 1890, a young friend and devoted admirer of Burton, Albert Letchford, produced 70 paintings which served as the basis for the illustrations in a new edition of Burton's translation that was published in 1897. Letchford had trained in Paris as an orientalist painter and he had spent time in Egypt. While hardly a great artist, he did share Burton's taste for the erotic and so nudes feature frequently in the illustrations. Moreover, he had a taste for the fantastic and some of his demons and temples are very weird indeed. He was shy and no businessman and consequently he was usually poorly paid. While still a young man, he contracted a disease in Egypt from which he later died in England.

These days adult fiction is rarely illustrated, but in the 18th and 19th centuries it was normal, and novels by Trollope, Surtees, Dickens and other much less well-known writers carried pictures. But towards the end of the 19th century, for reasons which are not clear, adult novels were no longer illustrated as a matter of course and illustrators found themselves restricted to working mostly on children's books. In the opening decade of the 20th century, gift books aimed at children became fashionable. They were expensively illustrated (and referred to by the historian of children's literature, Brian Alderson, as "cocoa-table books"). The colour plates on shiny paper were usually covered by protective sheets of tissue paper."

Review of The Islamic Context of The Thousand and One Nights

The Journal of Folklore Research has a new book review up on Muhsin J. al-Musawi's 2009 book The Islamic Context of The Thousand and One Nights.

The review is vast and lengthy and is written by Hasan El-Shamy, Professor at Indiana University and author of the 2006 book A Motif Index of The Thousand and One Nights, a specialized academic resource of tale types found in the Nights.

I haven't read the entirety of al-Musawi's book but I have it at home from the library.  It seems to be one of the few lengthy treatments of the topic (Islam & the Nights) though it also suffers, I think, from some of the generalizations of most Nights scholarship (ie does not necessarily treat individual variants of the Nights as idiosyncratic pieces of a much larger and looser literature instead relying on the Nights in a very broad sense).

El-Shamy's review can be read in its entirety here:  http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?id=975

Here is an excerpt:

"The chapters are logically arranged to present a sequence of historical and sociocultural developments as depicted in or inferred from the Nights as literature rather than folklore, written or oral. Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 7 address the Islamic Factor: in "Global Times" (25), as "the Unifying [...] Factor" (52), its role in "the Age of Muslim Empire and the Burgeoning of a Text" (106), and in "Scheherazade's Nonverbal Narratives in Religious Contexts" (250), respectively. In this context, "Global Times" signifies fraternity beyond ethnic and similar social distinctions (21). Meanwhile, chapter 5 discusses "Nonreligious Displacements in Popular Tradition," emphasizing the dichotomous patterning between the court and street or the rich and the poor (197), and between the secular and the religious (214, 231, cf. 224 where the fantastic partakes of the religious). Two chapters (4 and 6) are dedicated to the influence the population exerted on the formation of this narrative anthology; they bear the titles "the Role of the Public in The Thousand and One Nights," where the "readers" and their preferences are discussed (145), and "The Public Role in Islamic Narrative Theorizations" (228), respectively. Al-Musawi labels this cultural phenomenon associated with a readership the "urban mind," and points out that it distinguished Baghdad from the eighth to twelfth centuries C.E., and Mamluk Cairo later (6, 8, 22).

It is that "urban mind" and its desire to read 'asmâr (nightly entertainments) and hikâyât (tales) that motivated the movement among some elite to gather and re-write oral traditional folktales that came to be attributed to Sheherazade's oral tale-telling skills. Al-Musawi explains: "The effort to address a reading public is central to the [narrative] art, however, for it manifests both the damage done to the oral tradition... and the desire among some of the literati to dig into the marginalized culture or to refine it through acceptable embeddings and translated framing narratives" (230-231)."

Master Bibliography

This page will be the page where all bibliographic lists will be linked.  I'm a bit wary of making categories because there is just so much written on the Nights that an article or book would be able to fit in several but I'll try and make the categories as loose as possible, with annotations below.

Beginner's Bibliography
http://journalofthenights.blogspot.com/2009/06/beginners-bibliography.html
This is less of a strict bibliography and more of a "starting point" list I made for books and articles I would recommend to anyone beginning to study the Nights (or even those of you at an advanced-Nights level).

Aladdin (film) Bibliography
http://journalofthenights.blogspot.com/2010/12/aladdin-film-bibliography.html
A list of articles and books on the Disney film Aladdin.

Eastern Dreams by Paul Nurse, review

My review of Paul Nurse's Eastern Dreams: How the Arabian Nights Came to the World (2010) published by Penguin/Viking Canada is now online at the Journal of Folklore Research.

You can read the review here: http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?id=545

Paul Nurse's book has been out for several months now but is limited in its release to primarily Canada, which, given the book's scope and applicability, is too bad. Perhaps future editions will be given a wider distribution. You can, however, buy it from Amazon Canada with your Amazon user ID from the US or anywhere (http://www.amazon.ca/Eastern-Dreams-Paul-Nurse/dp/0670063606/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1288216198&sr=8-1).

Paul McMichael Nurse's Eastern Dreams - Early Release

From 1001 Nights

Paul McMichael Nurse's excellent and accessible history of the 1001 Nights (Eastern Dreams: How The Arabian Nights Came to the World) is set to be released earlier than expected by its publisher Penguin Canada. The new date is this August 1.

Here is the book's Penguin page:

http://www.penguin.ca/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780670063604,00.html?EASTERN_DREAMS_Paul_McMichael_Nurse

Looking forward to it!

- M

Paul Nurse's Eastern Dreams

From 1001 Nights

I'm honored to be the first to be able to show the upcoming (Penguin Canada/International) book cover for Paul Nurse's Eastern Dreams: How the Arabian Nights Came to the World. The cover looks great. Congratulations to Paul and can't wait until the book release. The book will be a historical overview of all of the major events in the history of the 1001 Nights (Galland to Mahdi and beyond) and will be an important addition to the serious academic inquiry on the 1001 Nights.

Scheherazade in England by Muhsin Jassim Ali

Scheherazade in England: A Study of Nineteenth-Century English Criticism of the Arabian Nights (1981). By Muhsin Jassim Ali, a mini review.

This book attempts to capture the reception of the Nights in England throughout the 18th and 19th centuries and despite its breadth does a good suggestive job at getting the ball rolling on critical studies surrounding the Nights. It is one of the few books about the influence of the Nights in European literature on a general level and one of the few focusing primarily on the critical reception of the Nights particularly.

The book’s (forgivable) failings include a sort of patchwork design that never seems to congeal underneath one clear and specific thesis. This is due, I suspect, to the book’s attempts at such a broad topic but what needs to be better stated is what the main argument is beyond the general notion that the Nights and their versions had individualistic influences on England and Europe. Also despite stating that his goal was to differentiate between the versions of the Nights and how the various critics responded to them at times it seems like it’s uncertain which version is being talked about.

One of the many positive things about the book its insistence that the different versions of the Nights were both reflective of different historical periods and also had different impacts as well. This is a main feature of my own study, just in its beginning stages really, but I’d like to insist that each manifestation of the Nights, from Mahdi to Disney and beyond, has its own unique set or sets of varying elements that are both suggestive of some notion of the past versions of the Nights but also carry with them their own unique sets of influences which have varied throughout history quite dramatically.

Another good point is that most of the focus of the book is on what critics say about the Nights in the pages of the periodicals and books of the time, a focus on evidence like this certainly points to some revealing and more general understandings of what the Nights was seen as at the time. This should though be done with caution as many studies I’ve seen (and even done!) have glossed over the journals themselves, several journals of the 19th century for example were decidedly pro-Burton because of Burton’s affiliation with those journals (or anti-Burton if it were the case), and of course the critics and editors all had their own agendas as well, which needs to be accounted for in any serious study.

Here are some quotes and points I found interesting:

“Excepting Sheila Shaw’s remarks on the value of Galland’s version for eighteenth-century fiction (Muslim World, XLIX [1959], 232-38; PMLA, XC [Jan. 1975], 62-68), there is virtually nothing written on the necessity of classifying and interpreting the impact of and responses to such various editions as those of Galland, Edward William Lane (1838-1841), John Payne (1882-1884), and Richard Burton (1885-1888). Central to my argument is the premise that these translations or redactions reveal much about contemporary predilections, and must be seen as significant signs of the prevailing literary concerns of the times” (6-7).

“Beyond the emphasis on the Nights as a useful repository of information, there was a growing concern to verify this information by a study of the original manuscripts. Perhaps it was no longer entirely safe to trust the Galland version. Accordingly, by the end of the [18th] century, critics and scholars were insisting that fully accurate translations of the tales be undertaken. No sooner was the authenticity of Galland’s version vindicated than Richard Hole and others called for an erudite, well-annotated and scholarly edition of the Nights” (27) - with note 45: “For a discussion of the authenticity of Galland’s version, see Gentleman’s Magazine, LX-VIII (Sept. 1798), 757; LXIV (1794), 784; and Monthly Review, XXIX (1799), 475” (35).

“Rather than revealing a uniform and consistent appreciation of Scheherazade’s aesthetics, a careful reading of nineteenth-century literary responses will indicate diverse and varying estimates and evaluations that form integral parts of the raging literary controversies of the day. Whereas the reading public as well as romantic critics saw in the very enjoyment of these recognizable beauties the sole pupose [sic] of reading, others, especially mid-Victorian critics, devoted a great deal of their time and energy to the study and analysis of the tales from contemporary perspectives” (74).

New Nights Book Scheduled for Release by Penguin

I'm happy to announce the scheduled release of Oriental Dreams: How the Arabian Nights Came to the World by Paul Nurse by Penguin Books Canada in September of 2010.

I've been lucky enough to see parts of a draft of the book and can say that a book of this scope and caliber has been a long time coming and will be a major part of Nights scholarship as well as an interesting read for the general public. The book will be largely a historical overview of the various manifestations and histories of the Arabian Nights with a comprehensive and coherent style accessible to both lay readers and experienced scholars alike.

I look forward to reading it in its entirety and wish the author and Penguin all the best of luck on it.

- M

dissertations on the nights

A cursory search via ProQuest brings up the following dissertations and abstracts based on the Nights:

(Sandra Naddaff's has been turned into her great book on the Nights):

"ARABESQUE: NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE AESTHETICS OF REPETITION IN THE "1001 NIGHTS" CYCLE OF "THE PORTER AND THE THREE LADIES OF BAGHDAD"
by NADDAFF, SANDRA ANN, Ph.D., Harvard University, 1983 , 215 pages; AAT 8403028
Abstract (Summary)

The present study limits itself to an examination of the narrative strategies and structures within one cycle of the 1001 Nights. The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad is present in a relatively stable form in all recensions of the 1001 Nights and is among the most intricate of its narratives. Like the other narratively generated cycles within the work, The Porter and the Three Ladies consists of a frame story within which unfold the tales of its main characters. Story-telling, then, is the main activity of the cycle, indeed the only activity which has value within this narrative universe. In this, the cycle mirrors the original frame story of the larger embedding work. In both narrative and thematic terms, the cycle speaks of the tale of Shahrazad, details in miniature fashion the larger narrative issues sketched before the first of the 1001 nights begins. The narrative concerns and tendencies which it exhibits are correspondingly significant.

It is the aim of this work to isolate and explain these concerns and tendencies. Arabesque had its genesis in an effort to define the basic narrative development of this particular cycle, to understand why The Porter and the Three Ladies moves in a manner so radically different from that of more conventional narratives. The further reaches of such an examination encompass the function of metaphor as a generative trope in narrative. From an analysis of the status of metaphor within this narrative, the study moves to an examination of the function of repetition as a mode of narrative discourse, and, further, to a close reading of the specific workings of narrative repetition on the level of both story and discourse in the cycle. The final chapter of the study interprets these narrative strategies in the light of the development of the Islamic ornament of arabesque, attempts to define the narrative equivalent of arabesque. In so doing, it hopes to offer a broader theoretical context within which the kind of narrative structure and discourse defined by the cycle of The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad can be read."



"Roots of oral tradition in "The Arabian Nights": An application of oral performance theory to "The story of the King of China's Hunchback"
by Mahir, Zaid Numan, M.A., University of Missouri - Columbia, 2007 , 116 pages; AAT 1459768
Abstract (Summary)

The aim of this thesis is to argue for The Arabian Nights as a work of verbal art whose roots are in the oral tradition of the Arab world. After a short premise meant to throw light on the status of oral storytelling in the Arab world, the thesis is divided into three chapters. The first is devoted to laying out a theoretical background for the application of an oral tradition approach. Chapters Two and Three are given to the application of this approach: Richard Bauman's Oral Performance framework. The text chosen for this application is the "Story of the King of China's Hunchback." The conclusions I draw afterwards are based on the illuminating results of the theory put to practice."

"Scheherazade reborn in the contemporary Francophone fiction of Leila Sebbar, Pierre Karch and Vinciane Moeschler
by DeVille, Jennifer Suzanne, Ph.D., The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006 , 184 pages; AAT 3219122
Abstract (Summary)

Since the mid-1980s, Francophone authors from both the Eastern and Western worlds have displayed a renewed interest in Scheherazade, the legendary storyteller of Les Mille et Une Nuits. This rediscovery of Scheherazade, particularly in the postcolonial context, serves as a vehicle for refuting hegemonic and patriarchal domination. As a multicultural figure, Scheherazade also functions as a means through which sexuality and maternity can be redefined. Furthermore, Scheherazade's recent renown is inextricably linked to the impact of globalization and multiculturalism in the information age, wherein the emblem of the empowered literary and political icon is available to all, regardless of race, gender, or geographical location.

The title character in each of the primary sources I examine in this dissertation is overtly named after Scheherazade. Although these primary works share a common namesake, however, the cultural, religious, ethnic and ethical values relating to the women within them vary considerably. The five novels and four short stories in which the Scheherazade figures appear were written over a span of twenty-one years, by both male and female authors from Algeria/France, Canada, and Switzerland.

In Leïla Sebbar's seven Shérazade works, the Scheherazade figure is an educated, powerful and defiant Beur runaway who is the quintessential anti-odalisque. Shérazade overcomes death and rape, ultimately becoming a mother-figure in contemporary Algeria. In Le Nombril de Scheherazade, Pierre Karch reinvents Scheherazade as a pseudo-transvestite storyteller in the Bahamas. Karch's abundant use of parody forces the reader to question the cultural construct of gender while simultaneously calling attention to dysfunctional family dynamics. In the case of Vinciane Moeschler's Schéhérazade, ma folie, both parodic Scheherazade figures succumb to languor, dependency and despondency. By presenting two ill-fated narratives of excess, one in Medieval Baghdad and another in contemporary Algiers and Brussels, Moeschler offers a diachronic reproachment of female hypersexuality and Western misperceptions of the East. In addition to subverting Orientalist stereotypes of Scheherazade, Sebbar, Karch and Moeschler refute the binary opposition between sexuality and maternity, thereby proffering a redefinition of women's voice, power and identity in the twenty-first century."

"The Spanish Shahrazad and her entourage: The powers of storytelling women in "Libro de los enganos de las mujeres"
by Hancock, Zennia Desiree, Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park, 2004 , 263 pages; AAT 3153133
Abstract (Summary)

The anonymous Libro de los engaños e asayamientos de las mugeres (LEM) is a collection of exempla consisting of a frame tale and twenty-three interpolated tales. It forms part of the Seven Sages/Sindibad cycle, shares source material with the Arabic Alf layla wa layla (A Thousand and One Nights) , and was ordered translated from Arabic into Romance by Prince Fadrique of Castile in 1253. In the text, females may be seen as presented according to the traditional archetypes of Eve and the Virgin Mary; however, the ambivalence of the work allows that it be interpreted as both misogynous and not, which complicates the straightforward designation of its female characters as "good" and "bad." Given this, the topos of Eva/Ave as it applies to this text is re-evaluated.

The reassessment is effected by exploring the theme of ambivalence and by considering the female characters as hybrids of both western and eastern tradition. The primary female character of the text, dubbed the "Spanish Shahrazad," along with other storytelling women in the interpolated tales, are proven to transcend binary paradigms through their intellect, which cannot be said to be inherently either good or evil, and which is expressed through speech acts and performances.

Chapter I reviews the historical background of Alfonsine Spain and the social conditions of medieval women, and discusses the portrayal of females in literature, while Chapter II focuses on the history of the exempla, LEM , and critical approaches to the text, and then identifies Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque and Judith Butler's speech act theory of injurious language as appropriate methodologies, explaining how both are nuanced by feminist perspectives. A close reading of the text demonstrates how it may be interpreted as a misogynous work. Chapter III applies the theoretical tools in order to problematise the misogynous reading of the text and to demonstrate the agency of its female speaker-performers; the analysis centres on the Spanish Shahrazad, who represents a female subjectivity that transcends binary depictions of women and represents a holistic ideal of existence that is reflected in the calculated, harmonized use of both her intellect and corporeality."

"THE FRAME-NARRATIVE AND SHORT FICTION: A CONTINUUM FROM "ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS" TO BORGES (JORGE LUIS BORGES, ARGENTINA)
by MORSY, FATEN I., Ph.D., University of Essex (United Kingdom), 1989 , 236 pages; AAT D-89972
Abstract (Summary)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF.

This thesis attempts a study of the framing device in Western short fiction as a continuity from 1001 Nights to Borges. By analysing some of the stories in the selected texts, the use of frame casts light on the relationship between Medieval entertaining function of fiction and the modern tradition of reflexive fiction.

Part I briefly defines some critical and theoretical concepts as a background against which the works at hand will be studied. Of these I single out the concept of literary history and the idea of cultural frontiers in which I point out as precisely as possible the relevance of these major issues to the overall purposes of the thesis.

Part II which is divided into 4 chapters, deals with the frame-narrative tradition in the Middle Ages. I start by a discussion of 1001 Nights emphasising its position both within its Arabic literary tradition and in Western European literature. The rest of the part is concerned with the shadow cast by 1001 Nights. Chapter 4 considers the frame-narrative device in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Decameron of Boccaccio, while in Chapter 5 a discussion of some of the novellas shows that both writers wrote stories that had entertainment as their main intention.

Part III is divided into two chapters which consider Las Novelas Ejemplares and Don Quixote respectively. The discussion of some of the novellas in the first collection and the analysis of a number of episodes in Don Quixote, are intended to show that Cervantes's work stands at an important junction in the historical development of the novella. Although Cervantes breaks away with the conventional frame-narrative tradition, he handles the frame so successfully that it becomes a prominent device in his "reflexive fiction".

The last part is devoted to the discussion of Borges's Ficciones which brings into focus the above considerations through an attempted analysis of some of his fictional pieces. While Chapter 8 examines some of the framing devices used by Borges, the last chapter looks at Borges's use of the "labyrinth"--which finds wide repercussions in the formal organization of the earlier novella collections--as his most appropriate definition for both the world and his fiction."

""A Thousand and One Nights" and the construction of Islam in the western imagination
by Oliver, Martyn Allebach, Ph.D., Boston University, 2009 , 309 pages; AAT 3348614
Abstract (Summary)

This dissertation examines the influence of the text popularly known as the Arabian Nights , introduced to Europe in 1704, in the development of Western representations of Islam and Muslims. It argues that the Nights , though neither a "religious" text nor overtly concerned with religious questions, had an extensive impact on how modern Western authors and readers depicted and imagined Islam. In the course of this analysis of the development of the Nights as an object of the Western imagination, "religion" as an object of academic inquiry is problematized, the concept of "Islam" in Western discourse is historically contextualized, and the relationship between religion and literature is examined.

Islam in the Nights exists as an assumed cultural constant. It is never explicitly described or explained, but operates instead as the religious context within which the action of the many interlocking stories occurs. The text depicts Islam in terms of what is now called "lived religion," the everyday practices of ordinary Muslims. There are, however, two complicating factors to this representation. First, many stories in the Nights involve supernatural events. Because the Nights was one of the first widely read literary objects from the Muslim world, Islam and the fantastic became intimately associated. Second, the translators of the Nights , in accordance with their individual opinions or professional aims, annotated their editions with a wide array of religious, cultural, and historical anecdotes. These notes both sought to explain Islam to the readers of the Nights and contributed to the development of a critical anthropology of Islam and the "Orient."

In this confluence of factors, the representation of Islam that emerged from Western renderings of the Nights was a study in contradiction: rational and irrational, sexually licentious and repressive, violent and forgiving. In conclusion, the developing image of Islam in the West parallels the development of Western self-identity. As the Nights was recast and retranslated, it mirrored and reinforced European and American ideas about themselves. This process of definition is ongoing, and the Nights continues to play a role in that story."

"Stories without end: A reexamination of Victorian suspense
by Murfin, Audrey Dean, Ph.D., State University of New York at Binghamton, 2008 , 215 pages; AAT 3339400
Abstract (Summary)

Suspense is a central preoccupation of Victorian literature, but it has been under-theorized. Unlike work that argues that suspense does the work of Victorian empiricism, "Stories without End" argues that by borrowing structures from popular culture, suspense undermines and challenges empiricism. This challenge to objective representation and the Victorian realist project occurs even in texts that are purportedly realistic. Instead, suspense insists on indeterminacy and open-ended meta-fictionality. My project explores structural devices and the cultural and literary-historical influences from which they are drawn. My first chapter studies how the linked stories modeled after the Arabian Nights , which defined much British short fiction, denied closure to readers. The second examines how the influence of Gothic texts expressed skepticism about realism even within realist novels. In my third chapter I demonstrate that the inclusion of newspaper structures in the novel challenged the narrative objectivity and reliability of even non-fiction reporting. Finally, my project concludes by considering the protests of popular writer and realist Arthur Morrison who maintained that the realist method was morally superior. By questioning the often arbitrary fault lines between high and low traditions, "Stories without End" advances scholarship on suspense by arguing that repeatedly through the Victorian period, literature and popular culture intersected in a manner that expressed significant doubt about the possibility of any real comprehension, or representation, of the world."

"Folk narrative in the nineteenth-century British novel
by Greenlee, Jessica, Ph.D., University of Oregon, 2006 , 228 pages; AAT 3251852
Abstract (Summary)

Nineteenth-century British authors frequently made use of popular narratives in their novels, often retelling fairy tales, ballads, and myths. Many of these narratives were well known due not only to oral transmission but also to printed chapbooks, broadsides, and pantomimes. This dissertation examines the way Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Charlotte Brontë used such narratives together with common traditional topoi to examine social issues of the day: gender-relations, the coming of the industrialized modern age, the changing of values, and the way institution, law, and tradition were applied to social problems. The focus is on Dickens's Bleak House , Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles , and Brontë's Jane Eyre , with reference to other works by each author. The narratives retold in these novels include fairy tales such as "Bluebeard," "Cinderella," "Beauty and the Beast," and "Sleeping Beauty," and tales from The Arabian Nights as well as ballads such as "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight" and "The Spotted Cow," and a host of songs about milkmaids. Myths include that of Demeter and Persephone, the Genesis account of the Creation and Fall of man, the biblical story of Esther, and the Arthurian legends.

The authors' views of the traditions in the tales varied. Brontë saw folk narratives as providing alternative ways of seeing the world and women's place in it and includes radical revisions of several fairy tales in Jane Eyre . The more conservative Dickens used fairy tales to reinforce the doctrine of separate spheres. Hardy saw folk narratives as representing a way of believing and living that was being squeezed out and made no longer relevant by the modern world. Tess's life follows the trajectory of milkmaid ballad and mythical goddess, but Hardy chooses forms of the narratives that are focused on death rather than life and renewal. In each case, common ground created by the use of traditional narratives provided a stable foundation on which to build theories and works of literary art that remain meaningful to this day."

"Literary modernity before novel and nation: Transaction and circulation between nineteenth-century Arabic, Persian and English literatures
by Rastegar, Kamran D., Ph.D., Columbia University, 2005 , 253 pages; AAT 3174877
Abstract (Summary)

To read nineteenth-century Arabic, Persian and English literary works has often meant to value these texts in accordance with their assimilation into the trajectories of novelistic writing and nationalist discourse: a predicament here termed the nationalist-novelist paradigm of literary historiography. In opposition to this limiting paradigm, it is the thesis of this dissertation that: (1) the appearance of contingent literary modernities may be identified within transactional texts--texts engendered through and emergent from travel or other intercultural contacts, or through the translation and circulation, and (2) these texts emerge from transformations in the social function for literature in these societies, and from the inter-linguistic circulation of literary texts among regional non-European languages and between these languages and European languages. The effect of these may be termed--with reference to Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital--the emergence of an autonomous field of literary production; a field no longer deriving legitimacy from sacred or theological utility, nor from accordance to a sovereign's pleasure, but from an entirely self-sufficient system of values and legitimization.

The production of Alf Layla wa Layla/Arabian Nights/Hizar a Yik Shab , emerges from a constellation of textual transactions, enabled through colonial institutions, to circulate within French and English readerships (themselves rife with anxieties over the value of the text) and "return" to its "source"--be that of Arab or Persian origin--to legitimize the emergence of autonomous fields of Arabic and Persian literary production. Similarly, the fictional travel narratives of James Morier ( Hajji Baba Ispahani ), Muhammad al-Muwaylih[dotbelow]i ( Fitra min al-Zaman: H[dotbelow]adith `Isa ibn Hisham ), Zayn al-Abedin Maraghih'i ( Safarnamih-yi Ibrahim Bayk ), and the travelogues of Haji Sayyah[dotbelow], Rifa'at Rifaa' al-T[dotbelow]aht[dotbelow]awi, and Mirza Salih[dotbelow] Shirazi, show how textual transactions enabled investigations into the nature of subjectivity and the institutions making up society, signaling the increasing autonomy of the act of writing, and reading. Ah[dotbelow]mad Faris al-Shidyaq's al-Saq `ala al-Saq makes innovative use of the print-book form as a literary response to the challenges to static religious, social and cultural identities, presenting a critical if irresolute literary imagination irresolvable within nationalist-novelist readings of the literary history of the period."

"Orientalism in translation: The one thousand and one nights in 18th century France and 19th century England
by Bouagada, Habib, M.A., University of Ottawa (Canada), 2005 , 120 pages; AAT MR11223
Abstract (Summary)

The objective of this study is to show how translation contributes to the "Orientalist" project and to the past and present knowledge of the Orient as it has been shaped by different disciplines such as anthropology, history and literature. In order to demonstrate this, I have decided to compare the Arabic text Alf Leyla wa Leyla (The One Thousand and One Nights) with the French translation by Antoine Galland (1704-1706) and the English translation by Sir Richard Burton (1885).

According to Edward Said, the Orientalist project or Orientalism is mainly a French and British cultural enterprise that has produced a wide-ranging wealth of knowledge about an Orient that has been represented as an undifferenciated entity with despotism, splendour, cruelty, or even sensuality being its main attributes.

I have chosen these translations because they come from places with a long Orientalist tradition. In 18 th century France, the age of the Belles infidèles , Galland is a man of the Enlightenment who appears to be a precursor of Orientalism as embodied in Montesquieu's Lettres persanes and Votaire's zadig . A century later, Burton's The Arabian Nights , backed by a deep knowledge of Islam, is published. Burton is an official in the service of the British Empire---an empire that takes pride in having the highest number of Muslim subjects.

The evolution of Alf Leyla wa Leyla and its translations is followed by an analysis of the shifts applied to the representations of Oriental elements found in it (social and religious practices). These shifts as well as the annotations that refer to Arabo-Islamic culture are related to Galland and Burton's intellectual development and to the socio-historical context of their respective translations."

"Mirrors of ink and wonderful lamps: The "Arabian Nights" in Victorian and postmodern literature
by Parreiras-Horta, Luis Paulo, Ph.D., University of Toronto (Canada), 2004 , 286 pages; AAT NQ94324
Abstract (Summary)

Recent scholarship has attributed the popularity of the Arabian Nights tales in the Arabic-speaking world to the fulfillment of expectations of worldly justice and reward rather than to the presence of magic. In contrast, this study finds that the tales' reception in late-imperial and postmodern English letters is governed by a disregard for their possible ethical and historical claims. This unmooring of the practice of translation from notions of fidelity and authenticity is precisely what attracted the postmodern writers Barth and Rushdie to the Pre-Raphaelite and Decadent texts of FitzGerald and Burton.

This study first situates Victorian translations of the Nights and Khayyam's Rubaiyat with recourse to previously unknown sources, including letters exchanged between the various translators and Pre-Raphaelite and Decadent poets and the 'foul papers' for Burton's Nights . This evidence suggests Lane alone among the translators was attentive to the claims of history and ethics on his material, while FitzGerald, Payne and Burton preferred Pre-Raphaelite and Decadent methods of translation that privileged sound over sense. Yet even Lane's notes to the Nights , which had informed Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot's respective interests in Islam and the occult, would later be gutted to suit the imperialist sentiment that accompanied Britain's invasion of Egypt in 1882. This reception attests to the power of Western institutions to reshape Eastern texts as foreseen by Said in Orientalism .

However, current postcolonial scholarship is less useful in understanding Burton and FitzGerald's influence on Barth and Rushdie. Barth's seminal postmodern prose and Rushdie's early postcolonial musings date to the sixties and mid seventies when reissues of Burton and FitzGerald's Eastern translations were in vogue in counter-cultural circles. In his prose Barth sought to rewrite Burton's notes rather than the original tales, and Rushdie privileged FitzGerald's Khayyam as exemplary of a positive conception of the migrant or 'translated man.' The influence of Said's Orientalism would prompt both writers to be more self-conscious about their use of Victorian translations of Eastern texts, but they would not altogether forsake a constructive engagement with this Victorian tradition in The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor and The Satanic Verses ."

"Orientalism and Romanticism: A historical dialectical relationship
by Abdelwahed, Said Ibrahim, Ph.D., Duquesne University, 1992 , 324 pages; AAT 9300159
Abstract (Summary)

This study is about the relationship between Orientalism and Romanticism. Chapter one reviews the cultural and economic dimensions of Orientalism and develops a historical strategy for investigating the Western portrayal of the Semitic East from the Crusades to the twentieth century.

Chapter two examines Orientalist ideas in major Romantic poems. These poems are Wordsworth's "Book V" of The Prelude, Byron's "Canto V" of Don Juan, Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Keats' The Eve of St. Agnes, and Scott's "The Crusader Returned." Wordsworth is believed to have read the pre-Islamic Arabic epics, and the Arabian Nights. His admiration of the Arabian Nights derived from its uniqueness and non-Western "spicy" atmosphere, its exoticism, and exceptional flavor. Byron is a prominent Orientalist Romantic poet who often portrays Middle Eastern culture in a negative light. Coleridge is believed to have plagiarized ideas and images from the Arabian Nights. Keats' imagination is drawn to the Middle East as a cheap source of poetic material and a good market place for English industrial production. Scott reconstructs Europe's Medieval past and undermines Islamic culture.

Chapter three studies various Middle Eastern images portrayed in some Romantic novels. The novels studied are Beckford's Vathek, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Scott's The Betrothed and Count Robert of Paris. Beckford lays the foundation stone for a new phase of Orientalism--Romantic Orientalism. In Frankenstein, Shelley proves a clear misunderstanding of the culture of the Middle East and she underestimates the value of the Muslim woman whose image she has taken from Percy Bysshe Shelley's Alastor. Moreover, Mary Shelley reflects Byronic ideas about the Middle East. Scott reconstructs Europe's history to revive racist ideas--common in the Middle Ages--of the Semitic East.

This study shows that when Romanticism as a literary movement came to life and flourished, Orientalism as a comprehensive European movement was mature and well established; it exerted an insurmountable influence over Romantic writers inside and outside England. The mutual admiration, love, respect and affinity between Romanticism and Orientalism make it impossible to study either of these two historical movements separately, as they have been thoroughly integrated into a historical dialectical relationship."

""Arabian Nights": Its background, its development as an original play, and the influence of the "Nights" on English literature and drama. (with Original writing);
by Hassan, Kaied Filfil, Ph.D., Texas Tech University, 1991 , 141 pages; AAT 9217278
Abstract (Summary)

In the Arabic and Islamic culture there is the legend Alf Layla Wa Layla, "The Thousand and One Nights," or the Arabian Nights Entertainments, the title usually used in English to refer to a group of tales that are adapted and formalized by storytellers. For hundreds of years these stories were handed down orally from generation to generation by the storytellers of the Arabs and Persians.

The rich imaginative power of the Nights has kept their hold on European imagination since its first translation in the opening of the eighteenth century to this day. The Arabian Nights' stories exercised an influence on English writing, particularly on drama and romantic fiction, making a profound impression that led to a series of imitations and adaptations. Through variations upon its plots and characters, the Nights has produced different exciting tales. Since the main function of drama is to tell a story, these stories could be a treasure for writing and dramatizing works for the stage.

The main portion of this dissertation is the text of an original play Arabian Nights, adapted and dramatized from some of these stories."

"A Victorian "Arabian Nights" adventure: A study in intertextuality
by Workman, Nancy Victoria, Ph.D., Loyola University of Chicago, 1989 , 293 pages; AAT 8912722
Abstract (Summary)

This study examines the referential relationship, or intertextuality, that exists between selected Victorian texts and a collection of medieval fairy tales, the Arabian Nights or The Thousand and One Nights. It argues that many Victorian writers used the imagery, themes, and narrative structures from this collection in their own work, and that a recognition of this relationship enriches the reader's understanding of individual texts, as well as the manner by which texts create "literary language" as they borrow and refer to one another.

To establish these relationships, chapter one discusses the "text" of the Arabian Nights and problems of critical inquiry regarding intertextuality. It establishes the rationale for using biographical information to corroborate textual evidence of citation, and it challenges the position on intertextuality advanced by Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes. Relying on a critical methodology suggested by Laurent Jenny in "The Strategy of Form," the dissertation examines representative types of intertextual relationships.

For example, chapter two analyzes how Charles Dickens used frequent allusions to the Nights in all his work. The allusions follow recognizable patterns and evoke one of the main themes in the collection, the power of storytelling to ransom the imaginative self from extinction. Chapter three addresses how two major poets of the era, Christina Rossetti and William Morris, used stories from the Nights as the source material from which they wrote their own adaptations. Rossetti took two long narrative poems which she condensed into her own short "The Dead City," whereas Morris greatly expanded a short story into "The Man Who Never Laughed Again," a selection from The Earthly Paradise. Chapter four demonstrates how Charlotte Bronte used subtexts from the Nights in creating her Angrian saga and her later mature work, Jane Eyre. Finally, chapter five examines George Meredith's The Shaving of Shagpat, a book length imitation of the Nights which borrows many fictional elements from the earlier work. Each chapter emphasizes how Victorian writing is permeated with the sounds and textures of Eastern contributions."

"THE INFLUENCE OF THE "ARABIAN NIGHTS" UPON NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH FICTION
by SHELTAG, HUSSEIN ABDUL-AZIM, Ph.D., University of Exeter (United Kingdom), 1989 , 242 pages; AAT DX89311
Abstract (Summary)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library.

Throughout history there have been interactions between England and the East. These connections were probably at their most extensive in the nineteenth century. The origins of these links are to be found in the First Crusade of 1096. The opportunities created by the crusaders permitted a mutual development of commercial links, political allegiances and literary communications. The first of these literary connections were the stories of the Arabian Nights heard by the crusaders and then recounted orally on their return to Europe. These tales soon penetrated into the popular literature of France and England. Thus, Giovanni Boccaccio is reputed to have incorporated ideas from these tales in his Decameron, and Geoffrey Chaucer's The Squire's Tale also contains close parallels with some Arabian tales.

The Elizabethan era witnessed a new direction in the relationship between England and the East. This was largely due to the general climate of the Renaissance, which encouraged new trade routes, exploration and colonization. There was a political purpose attached to the establishment of new trade routes and contacts. This is reflected in the founding of the Levant Company in 1581, which opened new channels of information for traders, scholars, diplomats and official envoys. These interests combined to extend the sphere of English foreign policy, and had the associated effect of arousing great curiosity in England about the East. It also initiated several works concerning the Eastern peoples. These included Richard Knolles' The General History of the Turks and William Painter's Palace of Pleasure, both of which acquired immense popularity and became major sources of information on the East. They were a particularly useful source of material for the Elizabethan dramatists. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)"

"Shahrazade's wake: The "Arabian Nights" and the narrative dynamics of Charles Dickens and James Joyce
by Power, Henriette Lazaridis, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1988 , 295 pages; AAT 8816216
Abstract (Summary)

Dickens and Joyce follow in the wake of Shahrazade, retracing and reviving the structures of her Arabian Nights tales. They also conduct a wake for this female storyteller, warding off the ghosts of her narration. As wakers of the Nights, Dickens and Joyce adopt a dual stance towards that Persian text: they change what they intend to repeat, and challenge the ghosts they pretend to revere. In their retelling of the Nights, Dickens and Joyce reveal their differing conceptions of the power of the reader and the female teller in the production of narrative.

The Arabian Nights is known as the text of Shahrazade's life-saving narration. But more important to Dickens and Joyce is the text's representation of gender and gesture. Shahrazade's subversion of the King's sexual and verbal power results from her digressive storytelling, and from her gestured narration of the tales for her sister; as the King watches, he becomes a voyeur whose power is compromised. Gender, gesture, and voyeurism are also significant to the pantomime versions of the Nights which Dickens and Joyce see as part of its text. In the spoken and the staged Nights, narrative becomes an exchange of power between male and female, word and body.

The first two chapters concern the treatment of the female storyteller in a range of Dickens' texts and in Joyce's later works. Dickens figures the female teller as a rival whose text must be silenced or coded by the narrator as inferior to Dickens' own. Joyce, however, uses what he represents as a female grammar to suspend the articulation of his text into coded meanings. Following an analysis of the pantomime, the last two chapters discuss Joyce's use of gestural language and voyeurism to involve the reader in the production of the text, and Dickens' use of the same elements in order to control the reader's interpretation.

This analysis of the borrowing and burying of the Nights enables a re-evaluation of the two writers' narrative dynamics: Joyce's work requires the reader it appears to alienate, while Dickens' minimizes the reader he seems to court."

"STYLISTIC FEATURES IN SELECTED TALES FROM "THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS" ("THE ARABIAN NIGHTS", "ALF LAYLAH WA-LAYLAH")
by PINAULT, DAVID, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1986 , 435 pages; AAT 8614849
Abstract (Summary)

This dissertation comprises a literary analysis of selected tales from the Alf laylah wa-laylah (The Thousand and One Nights), in which I collate texts from the nineteenth-century editions of MacNaghten (Calcutta II) and Bulaq and compare these two editions with the recently published Galland MS (BN 3609-3611), which has been edited by Muhsin Mahdi. I address the hitherto largely neglected area of "microstructural" analysis of the Alf laylah by attempting a line-by-line examination of the Arabic text of several tales from the collection, with the end in mind of defining and cataloguing characteristic stylistic techniques used by various redactors. As I compare differing versions of given stories, I coin terms (such as "repetitive designation" and "dramatic visualization") to describe these techniques as they are variously employed in Bulaq, MacNaghten and Galland.

In collating the three Arabic editions I found that they frequently diverge very sharply from each other in the staging of scenes within a given tale; furthermore, no one edition is consistently superior to another in its display of literary craftsmanship. Thus, for example, the Galland MS's version of the Scheherazade story shows better plot structure than the version found in Bulaq or MacNaghten; while the latter two texts are much more carefully developed thematically than G in those passages which comprise the inner frame of "The Tale of the First Lady" and are more coherent in their use of descriptive detail in important scenes from "The Two Viziers." On the basis of such findings I take issuse with the view expressed by Mahdi in his edition of the Galland MS, where he dismisses Bulaq and MacNaghten as abridged and inferior versions of Galland; for in some stories Bulaq and MacNaghten offer readings which are fuller and better crafted than Galland's. One can appreciate stylistic differences among the three editions only when one abandons sweeping critical generalizations and engages with the text in a process of close reading; for comparison of Bulaq, MacNaghten, and Galland on an individualized story-by-story basis demonstrates that the literary quality of the Alf laylah collection varies widely from tale to tale even within a single given edition."

"Nineteenth-century English criticism of the Arabian Nights
by Ali, Muhsin Jassim, Ph.D., Dalhousie University (Canada), 1978; AAT NK38370"

"THE INFLUENCE OF THE 'ARABIAN NIGHTS' ON EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO 'ROBINSON CRUSOE' AND 'GULLIVER'S TRAVELS'
by SHAW, SHEILA G., Ph.D., Bryn Mawr College, 1959; AAT 0210413"

"THE 'ARABIAN NIGHTS' IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE
by ANNAN, MARGARET C., Ph.D., Northwestern University, 1946 , 292 pages; AAT 0160278"

The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century

The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century is a 1908 book by Martha Pike Conant online for free at google books:

http://books.google.com/books?id=CUcLAAAAYAAJ

It's a pretty good overview of pre-20th century "Oriental" tales and their popularity in England, including lots on the Nights.

One interesting section was on pseudo-related Nights tales published and written by enterprising hacks:

"One of the most facile and prolific of French writers of pseudo-translations was Thomas Simon Gueullette (1683-1766). Four of his collections were translated into English under the names: Chinese Tales, or the Wonderful Adventures of the Mandarin Fum-Hoam...(1725); Mogul Tales, or the Dreams of Men Awake: being Stories Told to Divert the Sultanas of Guzarat, for the Supposed Death of the Sultan (1736); Tartarian Tales; or, a Thousand and One Quarters of Hours (1759); and Peruvian Tales Related in One Thousand and One Hours by One of the Select Virgins of Cuzco, to the Inca of Peru (1764)."

pp 31-32

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

Just finished reading The Matter of Araby in Medieval England by Dorothee Metlizki. In it she ties together several medieval stories written in Latin or English by Englishmen to several tales found in the 1001 Nights.

The book, (wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matter_of_Araby_in_Medieval_England), does a good job at tackling some of the issues of story transmission but is also somewhat delinquent because the "truth" of the history of these stories is far too complex to figure out just by saying both of them have flying horses or something.

Arabian Nights Encyclopedia Sale

The two volume Arabian Nights: An Encyclopedia is now on sale half off from the publisher:

>http://www.abc-clio.com/products/overview.aspx?productid=108633

At $92 USD it's a good deal for anyone interested in the Nights.

The entire encyclopedia is also available online for free but only through university library services so you have to either be physically in a University to view it (UC of California works but I'm not sure of others) or you have to be a student with remote access.

Think I'll get the print version to have around the house though.