The Arabian Nights in Historical Context
Between East and West

In the 300 hundred years following the translation of The Arabian Nights into French and English, a chain of editions, compilations, translations, and variations has circled the globe. Here scholars from across the world reassess the influence of the Nights in Enlightenment and Romantic literature and beyond.

Alf layla wa layla (known in English as A Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights) changed the world on a scale unrivalled by any other literary text. Inspired by a fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript, the appearance of Antoine Galland's twelve-volume Mille et Une Nuits in English translation (1704-1717), closely followed by the Grub Street English edition, drew the text into European circulation. Over the following three hundred years, a widely heterogeneous series of editions, compilations, translations, and variations circled the globe to reveal the absorption of The Arabian Nights into English, Continental, and global literatures, and its transformative return to modern Arabic literature, where it now enjoys a degree of prominence that it had never attained during the classical period.Beginning with a thorough introduction situating The Arabian Nights in its historical and cultural contexts-and offering a fresh examination of the text's multiple locations in the long history of modern Orientalism--this collection of essays by noted scholars from 'East', 'West', and in-between reassesses the influence of the Nights in Enlightenment and Romantic literature, as well as the text's vigorous after-life in the contemporary Arabic novel.

Introduction
1. Translation in the Contact Zone:
Antoine Galland's Mille et une nuits: contes arabes
2. Cultivating the Garden:
Antoine Galland's Arabian Nights in the Traditions of English Literature
3. Playing the Second String:
The Role of Dinarzade in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction
4. Galland, Georgian Theater, and the Creation of Popular Orientalism
5. Christians in The Arabian Nights
6. White Women and Moorish Fancy in Eighteenth-Century Literature
7. William Beckford's Vathek and the Uses of Oriental Reenactment
8. The peculiar character of the Arabian Tale: William Beckford and The Arabian Nights
9. Coleridge and the Oriental Tale
10. The Adventure Chronotope and the Oriental Xenotrope:
Galland, Sheridan, and Joyce Domesticate The Arabian Nights
11. Under the Spell of Magic:
The Oriental Tale in Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade
12. The Influence of The Arabian Nights on the Contemporary Arabic Novel