The Arabian Nights in Historical Context

Saree Makdisi is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (1998), and William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (2003). He has also written a number of articles for publications including Critical Inquiry, South Atlantic Quarterly, Studies in Romanticism, The Cambridge Companion to Blake, The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, and The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740-1830.Felicity Nussbaum is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Senior Global Fellow with the International Institute. She is the author most recently of The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (2003), and the editor of The Global Eighteenth Century (2003). Among her other publications are The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (1989), co-winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize; and Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire (1995).

The Arabian Nights in Historical Context showcases the range and quality of literary scholorship that the oriental tale is currently attracting... scholars of eighteenth-century and Romantic literature will find so much to interest them here, and this collection is also highly recommended to anyone involved in the continuing challenge of mapping out the wider cross-cultural influences of the Nights.

• 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