Scheherazade’s Children: Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights

Kennedy (Abu Nawas) and Warner’s (Stranger Magic) collection envisions the Arabian Nights as an ever-expanding “sea of stories,” and builds on increasing scholarly interest in this venerable “grandmother of tales.” The diverse essays piece together a story of influence on individual artists and philosophers—including George Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, and Paul Klee—as well as entire art forms, from painting to musical theater, and genres, such Indian cinema. The contributors show how each culture “that encountered the Nights was imprinted and colored by the stories’ particular character.” Some claims sound grand—the Nights as a formative influence on the European novel—but not entirely unwarranted, given that this flexible corpus yields whatever interpretation readers wish, whether an account of psychosexual politics or an example of “protofeminism.” 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 Orient of the mind.” Photos. (Nov.)