The Thousand and One Nights: Sources and Transformations in Literature, Art, and Science

The Thousand and One Nights: Sources and Transformations in Literature, Art, and Science

Author: Ibrahim Akel

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-04-28

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 9004429034

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The Thousand and One Nights does not fall into a scholarly canon or into the category of popular literature. It takes its place within a middle literature that circulated widely in medieval times. The Nights gradually entered world literature through the great novels of the day and through music, cinema and other art forms. Material inspired by the Nights has continued to emerge from many different countries, periods, disciplines and languages, and the scope of the Nights has continued to widen, making the collection a universal work from every point of view. The essays in this volume scrutinize the expanse of sources for this monumental work of Arabic literature and follow the trajectory of the Nights’ texts, the creative, scholarly commentaries, artistic encounters and relations to science. Contributors: Ibrahim Akel, Rasoul Aliakbari, Daniel Behar, Aboubakr Chraïbi, Anne E. Duggan, William Granara, Rafika Hammoudi, Dominique Jullien, Abdelfattah Kilito, Magdalena Kubarek, Michael James Lundell, Ulrich Marzolph, Adam Mestyan, Eyüp Özveren, Marina Paino, Daniela Potenza, Arafat Abdur Razzaque, Ahmed Saidy, Johannes Thomann and Ilaria Vitali.


The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures

The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures

Author: Muhsin J. al-Musawi

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-08-26

Total Pages: 437

ISBN-13: 1108474853

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A rich and nuanced study of the Arabian Nights in world cultures, analysing the celebration, appropriation, and translation of the stories over time.


Approaches to Teaching the Thousand and One Nights

Approaches to Teaching the Thousand and One Nights

Author: Paulo Lemos Horta

Publisher: Modern Language Association

Published: 2023-10-10

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1603295984

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The Thousand and One Nights, composed in Arabic from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries, is one of the world's most widely circulated and influential collections of stories. To help instructors introduce the tales to students, this volume provides historical context and discusses the many transformations of the stories in a variety of cultures. Among the topics covered are the numerous translations and their impact on the tales' reception; various genres represented by the tales; gender, race, and slavery; and adaptations of the stories in films, graphic novels, and other media across the world and under conditions of both imperialism and postcolonialism. The essays serve instructors in subjects such as medieval literature, world literature, and Middle and Near Eastern studies and make a case for teaching the Thousand and One Nights in courses on identity and race.


Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects

Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects

Author: Evanghelia Stead

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-12-20

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 3319538322

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This book contributes significantly to book, image and media studies from an interdisciplinary, comparative point of view. Its broad perspective spans medieval manuscripts to e-readers. Inventive methodology offers numerous insights into visual, manuscript and print culture: material objects relate to meaning and reading processes; images and texts are examined in varied associations; the symbolic, representational and cultural agency of books and prints is brought forward. An introduction substantiates methods and approaches, ten chapters follow along media lines: from manuscripts to prints, printed books, and e-readers. Eleven contributors from six countries challenge the idea of a unified field, revealing the role of books and prints in transformation and circulation between varying cultural trends, ‘high’ and ‘low’. Mostly Europe-based, the collection offers book and print professionals, academics and graduates, models for future research, imaginatively combining material culture with archival data, cultural and reading theories with historical patterns.


Sex and Desire in Muslim Cultures

Sex and Desire in Muslim Cultures

Author: Aymon Kreil

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-12-10

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1838604103

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What have different ideas about sex and gender meant for people throughout the history of the Middle East and North Africa? This book traces sex and desire in Muslim cultures through a collection of chapters that span the 9th to 21st centuries. Looking at spaces and periods where sexual norms and the categories underpinning them emerge out of multiple subjectivities, the book shows how people constantly negotiate the formulation of norms, their boundaries and their subversion. It demonstrates that the cultural and political meanings of sexualities in Muslim cultures - as elsewhere – emerge from very specific social and historical contexts. The first part of the book examines how people constructed, discussed and challenged sexual norms from the Abbasid to the Ottoman period. The second part looks at literary and cinematic Arab cultural production as a site for the construction and transgression of gender norms. The third part builds on feminist historiography and social anthropology to question simplistic dichotomies and binaries. Each of the contributions shows how understanding of sexualities and the subjectivities that evolve from them are rooted in the mutually-constitutive relationships between gender and political power. In identifying the plurality of discourses on desires, the book goes beyond the dichotomy of norm and transgression to glimpse what different sexual norms have meant at different times across the Middle East.


A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in the Long Eighteenth Century

A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in the Long Eighteenth Century

Author: Anne E. Duggan

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-07-15

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1350287547

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How have fairy tales from around the world changed over the centuries? What do they tell us about different cultures and societies? This volume traces the evolution of the genre over the period known as the long eighteenth century. It explores key developments including: the French fairy tale vogue of the 1690s, dominated by women authors including Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy and Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier, the fashion of the oriental tale in the early eighteenth century, launched by Antoine Galland's seminal translation of The Thousand and One Nights from Arabic into French, and the birth of European children's literature in the second half of the eighteenth century. Drawing together contributions from an international range of scholars in history, literature and cultural studies, this volume examines the intersections between diverse national tale traditions through different critical perspectives, producing an authoritative transnational history of the genre. An essential resource for researchers, scholars and students of literature, history and cultural studies, this book explores such themes and topics as: forms of the marvelous, adaptation, gender and sexuality, humans and non-humans, monsters and the monstrous, spaces, socialization, and power. A Cultural History of Fairy Tales (6-volume set) A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in Antiquity is also available as a part of a 6-volume set, A Cultural History of Fairy Tales, tracing fairy tales from antiquity to the present day, available in print, or within a fully-searchable digital library accessible through institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access (see www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com). Individual volumes for academics and researchers interested in specific historical periods are also available digitally via www.bloomsburycollections.com.


Approaches to Arabic Popular Culture

Approaches to Arabic Popular Culture

Author: Konerding, Peter

Publisher: University of Bamberg Press

Published: 2021-09-27

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 3863097661

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Over recent years, Arabic popular culture has become a focal point of West Asian and North African studies. Most of the new research dealing with it concentrates on the ?popular? as opposed to an intellectual ?high? culture far from the harsh and hierarchically organized reality many Arabic-speaking societies face today. Popular cultural practices are thus seen as a rejection of the elite and a stance against those who have ?something to loose? within paralyzed and conservative communities. Albeit not denying the subversive political potential associated with these practices, this volume intends to take a more nuanced and broader perspective. Arabic popular culture might engage with emancipatory claims, but it might as easily follow the capitalist rulebook of global marketing. It might fight against oppressive authorities, yet it can equally become their symbol.0Approaches to Arabic Popular Culture therefore closely looks at the aesthetic implications of a topic ranging from Lebanese hip hop over Algerian pop novels to jihadi chants in the ?Islamic State? as well as from Egyptian mahraganat music over sarcastic stories about hash dens and time travel in downtown Cairo to Saudi-Arabian YouTube-influencers. Thus, the theoretical scope widens and the reader is taken on a delightful journey to the unsettling pleasures of contemporary Arabic art and culture.


The Book of Travels

The Book of Travels

Author: Ḥannā Diyāb

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2021-05-04

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 1479892300

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The adventures of the man who created Aladdin The Book of Travels is Ḥannā Diyāb’s remarkable first-person account of his travels as a young man from his hometown of Aleppo to the court of Versailles and back again, which forever linked him to one of the most popular pieces of world literature, the Thousand and One Nights. Diyāb, a Maronite Christian, served as a guide and interpreter for the French naturalist and antiquarian Paul Lucas. Between 1706 and 1716, Diyāb and Lucas traveled through Syria, Cyprus, Egypt, Tripolitania, Tunis, Italy, and France. In Paris, Ḥannā Diyāb met Antoine Galland, who added to his wildly popular translation of the Thousand and One Nights several tales related by Diyāb, including “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” When Lucas failed to make good on his promise of a position for Diyāb at Louis XIV’s Royal Library, Diyāb returned to Aleppo. In his old age, he wrote this engaging account of his youthful adventures, from capture by pirates in the Mediterranean to quack medicine and near-death experiences. Translated into English for the first time, The Book of Travels introduces readers to the young Syrian responsible for some of the most beloved stories from the Thousand and One Nights. A bilingual Arabic-English edition.


Teaching the Global Middle Ages

Teaching the Global Middle Ages

Author: Geraldine Heng

Publisher: Modern Language Association

Published: 2022-10-28

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1603295194

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While globalization is a modern phenomenon, premodern people were also interconnected in early forms of globalism, sharing merchandise, technology, languages, and stories over long distances. Looking across civilizations, this volume takes a broad view of the Middle Ages in order to foster new habits of thinking and develop a multilayered, critical sense of the past. The essays in this volume reach across disciplinary lines to bring insights from music, theater, religion, ecology, museums, and the history of disease into the literature classroom. The contributors provide guidance on texts such as the Thousand and One Nights, Sunjata, Benjamin of Tudela's Book of Travels, and the Malay Annals and on topics such as hotels, maps, and camels. They propose syllabus recommendations, present numerous digital resources, and offer engaging class activities and discussion questions. Ultimately, they provide tools that will help students evaluate popular representations of the Middle Ages and engage with the dynamics of past, present, and future world relationships.


Stranger Magic

Stranger Magic

Author: Marina Warner

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2012-03-03

Total Pages: 577

ISBN-13: 0674065077

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Our foremost theorist of myth, fairytale, and folktale explores the magical realm of the imagination where carpets fly and genies grant prophetic wishes. Stranger Magic examines the profound impact of the Arabian Nights on the West, the progressive exoticization of magic, and the growing acceptance of myth and magic in contemporary experience.