Scheherazade's Children
Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights
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- 16,99 €
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- 16,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
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.
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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.