The Arabian Nights in contemporary world cultures : global commodification, translation, and the culture industry / Muhsin J. al-Musawi.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mūsawī, Muḥsin Jāsim, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Arabian nights--Influence.

Arabian nights.

Arabian nights--Adaptations.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 423 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Summary:

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 fo

Contents:

Cover

Half-title page

Frontispiece

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Stunning Growth of a Constellation

1 The Arabian Nights: A European Legacy?

A Phenomenal Arabian Nightism!

The Travels of a "Coarse Book"

Knowledge Consortiums

Like a Jar of Sicilian Honey? Or "Spaces of Dissension"?

Reclaiming a Poetics of Storytelling

Shifts in Periodical Criticism of the Nights: Old and New

A Decolonizing Critique

Constants and Variables

2 The Scheherazade Factor

The Empowering Dynamic

The Scheherazade Factor and Serial Narrative

Narrative Framing

The Frame Setting and Story

Relativity of Individual Blight

An Underlying Complexity

The Dynamics of the Frame Tale

The Missing Preliminary Volatile Sites

Pre-Scheherazade Women Actors

The Preludinal Site of Nuptial Failure

What Does the Muslim Chronicler Tell?

The Garden Site: The Spectacle

3 Engagements in Narrative

From Bethlehem to Havana: Imaginative Flights of the Nights

Butor's Second Mendicant and the Narrative Globe-Trotter

Confabulación Nocturna: Reinventing Scheherazade

Borges's Poetics of Prose

The Ever-Unfinished Work: Scheherazade's Proust

Barth's Linking: Sex and Narrative

Why Invest More in Dunyazade?

What Goes Wrong with John Barth's Postmodernism?

Tim Severin's Enactment of a Medieval Sindbad and Visual Experimentation

Najīb Maḥfūẓ's Cosmopolitan Female Narrator

A Narrative Grammar for Maḥfūẓ's Scheherazade

Loquacity and the Language of the Mad

Sufism as Critique of Power

4 The "Hostile Dynasty": Rewriting the Arabian Nights

A Translation Dynasty?

Galland's Afterlife

The Authentication Mania

Incitement to Undo Expurgation?

The Explosive Transactional Enterprise.

To Familiarize or Exoticize?

Conditions of Possibility/Conditions of Intelligibility

Arabists, Orientalists, and Philologists

Whose Translation?

The Issue of Aryan/Semitic Language Families

In Celebration of the Visual: Illustrations

The Power of Illustrated Nights

5 The Archaeology of A Thousand and One Nights

Contexts of Evolution of 1001 Nights

Domains of Statements: Divided Readerships

Raconteurs and Scribes

Whose Authorship among So Many Names?

Other Instances of the Migration of Tales

Genesis and Episteme

Early Arab Narratological Findings

Arabic Classification of Narrators

European Archaeological Explorations

6 Signatures and Affiliates

Why a "Major Event for All of European Literature"?

Filiates: The Romantic Craze - The Matter with William Beckford's Vathek

Schlegel on the Grotesque and Arabesque: The Counterdiscourse

Vathek, Satraps, and Interior Infinite

Affiliates: The Brontës and After

Murky Sensualism of the Western Bourgeoisie

Shifts in Reading the Nights

A Postcolonial or a Postmodernist Scheherazade

How Does the Cinema Cope with Postmodernism?

From Opa-locka to Baghdad: Emancipated Architecture

Authenticating a Pastiche? Codrescu's Transgeneric Frame

7 Decolonizing the Arabian Nights?

Emancipatory Poetics from a Western Rationality

Anxieties over the "Oriental" Mode

Lane as Heir to De Sacy's Legacy

The Philologist's Skills at Work

Commoditization and Revolt

Visual Narrative

Imperial Representations: Compliance and Resistance

8 Invitation to Discourse

John Payne Matters

Critical Typologies: The New Philological Inquiry

Textual and Genealogical Criticism

The Comparatists' Pursuits

Literary Criticism: Genres and Translational Mediums

Literary Criticism: Poetics of Narrative

Cultural Criticism.

History as Narrative and Narrative as History

A Way to Conclude?

Appendix A: Editions Worldwide

Appendix B: Selections from a Comparative Study between the Grub Street Translation of Galland (Reprinted in The Novelist's Magazine), and Haddawy's Translation of Muhsin Mahdi's Edition of Galland's Original Arabic Manuscript

Select Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 20 Aug 2021).

ISBN:

1-108-57713-X

1-108-69977-4

1-108-59384-4

OCLC:

1276860193