Scheherazade’s Children: Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights

Product Description

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 Nights, and provides unexpected contexts for understanding the book’s complex history. Polemical issues are thereby given unprecedented and enlightening interpretations. Organized under the rubrics of Translating, Engaging, and Staging, these essays view the Nights corpus as a uniquely accretive cultural bundle that absorbs the works upon which it has exerted influence. In this view, the Arabian Nights is a dynamic, living and breathing cross-cultural phenomenon that has left its mark on fields as disparate as the European novel and early Indian cinema. While scholarly, the writers’ approach is also lively and entertaining, and the book is richly illustrated with unusual materials to deliver a sparkling and highly original exploration of the Arabian Nights’ radiating influence on world literature, performance, and culture.

From Publishers Weekly

Kennedy (Abu Nawas) and Warner’s (Stranger Magic) collection envisions the Arabian Nights as an ever-expanding sea of stories, and builds on increasing scholarly interest in this venerable grandmother of tales. The diverse essays piece together a story of influence on individual artists and philosophers—including George Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, and Paul Klee—as well as entire art forms, from painting to musical theater, and genres, such Indian cinema. The contributors show how each culture that encountered the Nights was imprinted and colored by the stories’ particular character. Some claims sound grand—the Nights as a formative influence on the European novel—but not entirely unwarranted, given that this flexible corpus yields whatever interpretation readers wish, whether an account of psychosexual politics or an example of protofeminism. These scrupulously documented essays justify study of the Nights as one of the wellsprings of World Literature that continues to draw readers, scholars, translators, and artists into a theatrical, imaginary land, which, like the narrator herself, casts an entrancing spell and proves inexhaustible in meanings, blending cultural specificities into one vast Orient of the mind. Photos. (Nov.)

Review

“[A] splendid recently published anthology.” — Patricia Storace ―
The New York Review of Books

“[T]he two editors, both of them well established figures in their relative fields, have done excellent work in producing a volume that has its own internal logic . . . The contributions to this volume are all, by any yardstick one may wish to apply, superb essays in cultural studies, and, in many cases comparative literature studies. A distinguished contribution to Arabian Nights studies.” — Roger Allen, University of Pennsylvania

“It is almost impossible now for Western writing not to draw on the Nights. This collection is a call to us to go back to that most wonderful of books, Alf layla wa-layla, and read and reread it endlessly, and learn from it as equals.” — Roz Kaveney ―
Times Literary Supplement

“The Arabian Nightsis one of a kind in leaving a lasting mark on various fields of knowledge, including art, theater, screen, and literature. Until the appearance of the Arabian Nights, no mythical character had captured such wide and global attention as Scheherazade, with her wit, intelligence, and courage. The work, like its evolving tales, continues to generate scholarly studies and diverse cultural work of merit. Kennedy and Warner have put together such a book.Scheherazade’s Childrenprovides a solid te