The Arabian Nights is a collection of tales of undefined extent and identity. Outside the English-speaking world they are usually known as One thousand and One Nights. They often have been adapted or plagiarized. In the Arabic-speaking world the tales hold no preeminent or even clearly defined status. There is still no truly standard edition or translation. The intensive research on the tales authorship, date, and textual development has served more to reveal the complexities of these problems than to resolve them.
Fiction in the Islamic culture was held in low regard in the formal civilization of classical Islam. Tales were told orally, and apparently only by and for common people. Maybe because of their popular colloquial nature that influenced against their being any recorded scripts explains the reason why there is a lack of early documents from which to trace the tales’ history. Many of the stories are thought to be of Indian origin and to have undergone Persian transmission and remolding, both before and after the advent of the Islamic period in the 7 th century A. D. The tales are supposed to have been written down comprehensively in Mam luk Egypt around the 15 th century.
Much of the social background belongs to Egypt rather than to Baghdad of the 8 th and 9 th centuries. The Arabian Nights is a classical example of the “frame story.” For this particular assignment we chose the story of “The two Kings, Shah Shahryar and Shah Zaman, and the wazir’s daughter Sherezade.” The individual tales are set within the framework of a feint used by the newly married Scheherazade to preserve her life by her skill as a storyteller. The earliest extended Western version was in French, published by the scholar, traveler, and civil servant Jean Antoine Galland between 1704 and 1717. This translation served for a century as the basis of many others in a wide range of languages. Later scholars returned to the original Arabic manuscript purchased by Galland or used other texts and additional material. Sir Richard Burton later wrote the English version in the 1880’s.
The Essay on 19th Century Horror Stories
... reader to the mood of the story. Nearly every 19th Century Horror story used this method of writing, including ... of all their wonder, fear, and excitement the night before, is ‘pitched on the sideboard with a ... and the criminals are many miles away. Another famous tale from this period is “The Monkey’s Paw” ... belief in its virtues’. The family laugh the tale of the sergeant off, making a mockery of ...
This English version is often a mere plagiarism of previous versions by E. W. Lane (1839-1841) and John Payne (1882-1884, 1889).
In the English-language edition, the earliest manuscript was translated by a guy named Husain Haddaway from Mushkin Mahdi’s 1984 edition (Norton 1990).
It does not include some tales such as the stories of Sindbad and Ali Baba. Other recent editions include The Arabian Nights, edited by Jack Zines (NAL/Dutton 1991).
And of course the most recent version by Brian Alderson (1992) first published in Great Britain in 1992 By Victor Gollancz Ltd. In the United States Morrow Junior Books first published it in 1995.
