NYPL Digital Collections
Arabian Nights' Entertainments by
No other edition offers extensive textual apparatus such as explanatory notes, plot summaries, particularly vital as stories are complex and interwoven.The Sultan Schahriar's misguided resolution to shelter himself from the possible infidelities on his wives leads to an outbreak of barbarity in his kingdoms and a reign of terror in his court, stopped only by the resourceful Scheherazade. The tales with which Scheherazade nightly postpones themuderous intent of the sultan have entered our language and our lives like no other collection of narratives before or since. Sinbad, Aladdin, Ali Baba: all make their spectacular entrance on to the stage of English literary history in the Arabian Nights Entertainments (1704-17). The storiescontained in this `store house of ingenious fiction' initiate a pattern of literary reference and influence which today remains as powerful and intense as it was throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.This edition reproduces in its entirety the earliest English translation of the French orientalist Antoine Galland's Mille et une Nuits. This remained for over a century the only English translation of the story cycle, influencing an incalculable number of writers, and no other edition offers thecomplete text supplemented by full textual apparatus.
The Arabian Nights: Their Best-known Tales by
When Scheherazade marries a ruthless king known for taking a new bride each night only to have his wife killed the next morning, she comes up with a clever plan to survive. Each night, she tells the king a story. And each morning, the king postpones her execution so he can hear how it ends. Scheherazade's stories continued for one thousand and one nights. The text was first translated from Arabic into English in the early eighteenth century. In the early twentieth century, American children's authors Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora A. Smith selected and edited ten of the best-known stories to enchant young readers. Taken from the 1909 copyright edition, this collection of Middle Eastern folktales includes "The Story of Aladdin," "The Story of Sinbad the Voyager," and "The Story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves."
The Islamic Context of the Thousand and One Nights by
In this fascinating study, Muhsin J. al-Musawi shows how deeply Islamic heritage and culture is embedded in the tales of The Thousand and One Nights (known to many as the Arabian Nights) and how this integration invites readers to make an Islamic milieu. Conservative Islam dismisses The Thousand and One Nights as facile popular literature, and liberal views disregard the rich Islamic context of the text. Approaching the text with a fresh and unbiased eye, al-Musawi reads the tales against Islamic schools of thought and theology and recovers persuasive historical evidence to reveal the cultural and religious struggle over Islam that drives the book's narrative tension and binds its seemingly fragmented stories. Written by a number of authors over a stretch of centuries, The Thousand and One Nights depicts a burgeoning, urban Islamic culture in all its variety and complexity. As al-Musawi demonstrates, the tales document their own places and periods of production, reflecting the Islamic individual's growing exposure to a number of entertainments and temptations and their conflict with the obligations of faith. Aimed at a diverse audience, these stories follow a narrative arc that begins with corruption and ends with redemption, conforming to a paradigm that concurs with the sociological and religious concerns of Islam and the Islamic state. By emphasizing Islam in his analysis of these entertaining and instructional tales, al-Musawi not only illuminates the work's consistent equation between art and life, but he also sheds light on its underlying narrative power. His study offers a brilliant portrait of medieval Islam as well, especially its social, political, and economic institutions and its unique practices of storytelling.
Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights by
Ranging from the coffeehouses of Aleppo to the salons of Paris, from Calcutta to London, Paulo Lemos Horta introduces the poets and scholars, pilgrims and charlatans who made largely unacknowledged contributions to Arabian Nights. Each version betrays the distinctive cultural milieu in which it was produced.
New Arabian Nights by
Considered by many to contain pioneering works of English writing, Robert Louis Stevenson's New Arabian Nights collects together his short stories that were originally published in periodicals between 1877 and 1880. Holding some of Stevenson's first works of fiction to be published, some of these stories are thought by critics to be his best.
On the Art of Medieval Arabic Literature by
In applying the standards of modern literary criticism to medieval Arabic literature, Andras Hamori concentrates on those aspects of the literature that appear most alien to modern Western taste: the limitation of themes, the sedimentation with conventions, and the use of elusive patterns of composition. The first part of the book approaches Arabic literature from the historical point of view, concentrating on the transformations in poetic genres and poetic attitudes towards time and society in the literature between the sixth and the tenth centuries. The problems of poetic technique are then discussed, with special emphasis on poetic unity and the use of conventions. The third part of the book deals with methods of composition in prose through an examination of the orders and disorders in two tales from the Arabian Nights. Originally published in 1974. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Scheherazade's Children: Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights by
Scheherazade's Children gathers together leading scholars to explore the reverberations of the tales of the Arabian Nights across a startlingly wide and transnational range of cultural endeavors. The contributors, drawn from a wide array of disciplines, extend their inquiries into the book's metamorphoses on stage and screen as well as in literature--from India to Japan, from Sanskrit mythology to British pantomime, from Baroque opera to puppet shows. Their highly original research illuminates little-known manifestations of the Nights, and provides unexpected contexts for understanding the book's complex history. Polemical issues are thereby given unprecedented and enlightening interpretations. Organized under the rubrics of Translating, Engaging, and Staging, these essays view the Nights corpus as a uniquely accretive cultural bundle that absorbs the works upon which it has exerted influence. In this view, the Arabian Nights is a dynamic, living and breathing cross-cultural phenomenon that has left its mark on fields as disparate as the European novel and early Indian cinema. While scholarly, the writers' approach is also lively and entertaining, and the book is richly illustrated with unusual materials to deliver a sparkling and highly original exploration of the Arabian Nights' radiating influence on world literature, performance, and culture.
Whatever Gets You Through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments by
"I fear each passing night that I will not receive my maintenance dose of suspense, and then I will cease to exist."--Whatever Gets You through the Night Whatever Gets You through the Night is an irreverent and deeply funny retelling of the Arabian Nights and a wildly inspired exploration of the timeless art of storytelling. Award-winning writer Andrei Codrescu reimagines how Sheherezade saved Baghdad's virgins and her own life through a heroic feat of storytelling--one that kept the Persian king Sharyar hanging in agonizing narrative and erotic suspense for 1001 nights. For Sheherezade, the end of either suspense or curiosity means death, but Codrescu keeps both alive in this entertaining tale of how she learned to hold a king in thrall, setting with her endless invention an unsurpassable example for all storytellers across the ages. Liberated and mischievous, Codrescu's Sheherezade is as charming as she is shrewd--and so is the story Codrescu tells.
