Cultural Encounters with the Arabian Nights in Nineteenth-Century Britain

ISBN-13: 9781474443647 / Angielski / Twarda / 2019 / 232 str.

Melissa Dickson

Opis

Aladdin, Sinbad, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Scheherazade winding out her intricate tales to win her nightly stay of execution: the stories of the Arabian Nights are a familiar and much-loved part of the English literary inheritance. But how did these tales become so much a part of the British cultural landscape? Dickson identifies the nineteenth century as the beginning of the large-scale absorption of the Arabian Nights into British literature and culture. She explores how this period used the stories as a means of articulating its own experiences of a rapidly changing environment. She also argues for a view of these tales not as a depiction of otherness, but as a site of recognition and imaginative exchange between East and West, in a period when such common ground was rarely found.

Spis treści

List of Illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. ‘For a time their world made mine’: Childhood Encounters with the Arabian Nights; 2. Underground Palaces and Castles in the Air: The Realms and Ruins of the Arabian Nights; 3. The Magical Metropolis; 4. Magic and Machines at the Great Exhibition; 5. Epilogue: A New Arabian Nights; Bibliography; Index.