Arabian Night's Entertainments

by Mack, Robert L.

• ISBN13: 9780192834799
• ISBN10: 0192834797
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-03-06
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

No other edition offers extensive textual apparatus such as explanatorynotes, plot summaries, particularly vital as stories are complex and interwoven.The Sultan Schahriar's misguided resolution to shelter himself from thepossible infidelities on his wives leads to an outbreak of barbarity in hiskingdoms and a reign of terror in his court, stopped only by the resourcefulScheherazade. The tales with which Scheherazade nightly postpones the muderousintent of the sultan have entered our language and our lives like no othercollection of narratives before or since. Sinbad, Aladdin, Ali Baba: all maketheir spectacular entrance on to the stage of English literary history in theArabian Nights Entertainments (1704-17). The stories contained in this 'storehouse of ingenious fiction' initiate a pattern of literary reference andinfluence which today remains as powerful and intense as it was throughout theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries.This edition reproduces in its entirety the earliest English translation of theFrench orientalist Antoine Galland's Mille et une Nuits. This remained for overa century the only English translation of the story cycle, influencing anincalculable number of writers, and no other edition offers the complete textsupplemented by full textual apparatus.

Author Biography

Robert L. Mack is a writer and editor who has worked on a number of volumes for Oxford World's Classics. He is the author of Thomas Gray: A Life.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Select Chronology of the Life of Antoine Galland and the Appearance of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments in Europe
Arabian Nights' Entertainments	p. 1
Principal Place-Names in the Arabian Nights' Entertainments	p. 893
Plot Summaries	p. 897
Explanatory Notes	p. 927
Index of Tales and Proper Names	p. 937
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