Our foremost theorist of myth, fairytales, and folktales explores the magical realm of the imagination where carpets fly, objects speak, dreams reveal hidden truths, and genies grant prophetic wishes. "Stranger Magic" examines the wondrous tales of the "Arabian Nights, " their profound impact on the West, and the progressive exoticization of magic since the eighteenth century, when the first European translations appeared.

The "Nights" seized European readers' imaginations during the siecle des Lumieres, inspiring imitations, spoofs, turqueries, extravaganzas, pantomimes, and mauresque...

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...

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...

The last film in Vigo's tragically short career, L'Atalante has achieved legendary status over the past eighty years. A study of romantic love, it is told in a style influenced by surrealism, but still Vigo's own. This reissued edition features original cover artwork and a substantial new prologue that revisits the film and recent readings of it.

Consorts of the Caliphs is a seventh/thirteenth-century compilation of anecdotes about thirty-eight women who were consorts to those in power, most of them concubines of the early Abbasid caliphs and wives of latter-day caliphs and sultans. This slim but illuminating volume is one of the few surviving texts by the prolific Baghdadi scholar Ibn al-Sa'i, who chronicled the academic and political elites of his city in the final years of the Abbasid dynasty and the period following the...