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"Arabian Nights" : A Companion - Robert Irwin

"Arabian Nights"

A Companion

By: Robert Irwin

Paperback | 1 October 1995

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The book of The Arabian Nights has become a synonym for the fabulous and the exotic. Every child is familiar with the stories of Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor and Ali Baba. Yet very few people have a clear idea of when the book was written or what exactly it is. Far from being children's stories, The Arabian Nights contains hundreds of narratives of all kinds - fables, epics, erotica, debates, fairy tales, political allegories, mystical anecdotes and comedies. It is a labyrinth of stories and of stories within stories. The Arabian Nights: A Companion guides the reader through this labyrinth, but above all uses the stories as a key to the social history and the counter-culture of the medieval Near East and the world of the storyteller, the snake charmer, the burglar, the sorcerer, the drug-addict, the treasure hunter and the adulterer. Book jacket.
Industry Reviews
Robert Irwin's brilliant exploration of The Arabian Nights, their place in our culture and their own, elucidates a series of discoveries as various and fantastic as any made in the book itself. He explores how the stories came to be collected; the transmission from Sanskrit, Persian, Greek and Coptic sources; the style and vocabulary; the influences that the tales have had on Western art and literature; the problem of 'orientalism'; and critical attitudes to the tales through the years. There the reader finds tales within tales, rooms within rooms of magical palaces: and each area investigated opens on others, often unexpected, continually absorbing. This is not one for the nursery bookshelf. The Nights must shift place accordingly. (Kirkus UK)

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