The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures
Global Commodification, Translation, and the Culture Industry

A rich and nuanced study of the Arabian Nights in world cultures, analysing the celebration, appropriation, and translation of the stories over time.

Muhsin J. al-Musawi (Author)

9781108465557, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 9 March 2023

435 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm, 0.627 kg

'Al-Musawi brings a lifetime of Arabian Nights' scholarship to bear on his expansive new study of its generative role in the Western and Global literary and cultural imagination from the 18th century to the present. Ranging from Romanticism through Modernism to Post-Modernism, al-Musawi compellingly demonstrates how this protean Arabic story collection has shaped the novel, music, fine arts, and film.' Suzanne Stetkevych, Georgetown University

The stories in the Thousand and One Nights, or the Arabian Nights, are familiar to many of us: from the tales of Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and his forty thieves, to the framing story of Scheherazade telling these stories to her homicidal husband, Shahrayar. This book offers a rich and wide-ranging analysis of the power of this collection of tales that penetrates so many cultures and appeals to such a variety of predilections and tastes. It also explores areas that were left untouched, like the decolonization of the Arabian Nights, and its archaeologies. Unique in its excavation into inroads of perception and reception, Muhsin J. al-Musawi's book unearths means of connection with common publics and learned societies. Al-Musawi shows, as never before, how the Arabian Nights has been translated, appropriated, and authenticated or abused over time, and how its reach is so expansive as to draw the attention of poets, painters, illustrators, translators, editors, musicians, political scientists like Leo Strauss, and novelists like Michel Butor, James Joyce and Marcel Proust amongst others. Making use of documentaries, films, paintings, novels and novellas, poetry, digital forums and political jargon, this book offers nuanced understanding of the perennial charm and power of this collection.

Introduction: the stunning growth of a constellation
1. The Arabian Nights: a European legacy?
2. The Scheherazade factor
3. Engagements in narrative
4. The 'hostile dynasty': rewriting the Arabian Nights
5. The archaeology of A Thousand and One Nights
6. Signatures and affiliates
7. Decolonizing the Arabian Nights?
8. Invitation to discourse
Bibliography
Appendix A. Editions worldwide
Appendix B. Selections from a comparative study between Grub Street translation of Galland (reprinted in Novelist magazine), and Haddawy's translation of Muhsin Mahdi's edition of Galland's original Arabic manuscript of Galland.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural history [HBTB], Middle Eastern history [HBJF1], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]