Synopses & Reviews
Scheherazades 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 books 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 books 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.
Philip F. Kennedy is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University, and General Editor of the Library of Arabic Literature series at NYU Press.
Marina Warner is Professor of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex and Fellow of the British Academy. Her most recent book, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, has won several awards, including the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and the Shaykh Zayed Book Award.
Review
"[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,
Review
"The Arabian Nights as much as any work created the category now known as ‘world literature. The lively and lucid essays in Scheherazades Children explore the fascination and influence The Nights have exerted in various cultures and the books sometimes surprising and often amusing metamorphoses."-Daniel Beaumont, author of Slave of Desire: Sex, Love, and Death in the 1001 Nights,
Review
"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 Prient of the mind.'"-Publishers Weekly,
Review
"Beautifully illustrated, this title concludes with a list of the stories, their translations, and adaptations. Though the essays take up academic subjects, they are accessible to general readers."-Library Journal,
Review
"Their research provides an understanding of the intricate history of the book through startling contexts and sheds light on the little-known revelations of the Nights."-NYU Press,
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
Philip F. Kennedy is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University, and Vice Provost for Public Programming for the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute.
Marina Warner is Professor of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex and Fellow of the British Academy. Her most recent book, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.