Scheherazade’s Children: Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights

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. The sea-born tale: eighteenth-century English translations of The thousand and one nights and the lure of elemental difference / Ros Ballaster -- Re-orienting William Beckford: transmission, translation, and continuation of The thousand and one nights / Laurent Châtel -- The collector of worlds: Richard Burton, Cosmopolitan translator of the Nights / Paulo Lemos Horta -- The porter and portability: figure and narrative in the Nights / Elliot Colla -- The rings of budur and Qamar al-Zaman / Wendy Doniger -- White magic: Voltaire and Galland's Mille et une nuits / Roger Pearson -- The Arabian nights and the origins of the Western Novel / Robert Irwin -- "A covenant for reconciliation" Lane's Thousand and one nights and Eliot's Daniel Deronda / Paulo Lemos Horta -- Translating destiny: Hugo von Hoffmanstahl's "Tale of the 672nd night" / Dominique Jullien -- Borges and the missing pages of the Nights / Philip F. Kennedy -- The politics of conversation: Denis Diderot, Elio Vittorini, Manuel Puig, Masaki Kobayashi, Vasily Grossman / Katie Trumpener -- Sinbad the Sailor: textual, visual, and performative interpretations / Ferial J. Ghazoul -- The Arabian Nights in British Pantomime / Karl Sabbagh -- The Arabian Nights in traditional Japanese performing arts / Yuriko Yamanaka -- "Nectar if you taste and go, poison if you stay": struggling with the Orient in Eighteenth-century British musical theater / Berta Joncus -- Scheherazade, Bluebeard, and theatrical curiosity / Elizabeth Kuti -- The Takarazuka revue and the fantasy of "Arabia" in Japan / Tetsuo Nishio -- Thieves of the Orient: the Arabian nights in early Indian cinema / Rosie Thomas -- Afterword: My Arabian superheroine / Alia Yunis.