Cultural Encounters with the Arabian Nights in Nineteenth-Century Britain

'This wonderful book shows how firmly the Arabian Nights was embedded in the British cultural psyche during the nineteenth century. From childhood reading through to stage performances and the narratives of archaeology and industrial modernity, this astute study tracks the ways in which the Arabian Nights wove its own forms of entrancement. Dickson's subtle text calls for a recalibration of our understandings of 'Orientalism' in the nineteenth century.'
Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford
An overview of the cultural transmission of the Arabian Nights within nineteenth-century Britain
Aladdin, Sinbad, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Scheherazade winding out her intricate tales to win her nightly stay of execution: the stories of the Arabian Nights are a familiar and much-loved part of the English literary inheritance. But how did these tales become so much a part of the British cultural landscape?
Dickson identifies the nineteenth century as the beginning of the large-scale absorption of the Arabian Nights into British literature and culture. She explores how this period used the stories as a means of articulating its own experiences of a rapidly changing environment. She also argues for a view of these tales not as a depiction of otherness, but as a site of recognition and imaginative exchange between East and West, in a period when such common ground was rarely found
Melissa Dickson is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Birmingham.
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ISBN 978-1-4744-4364-7
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