The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures: Global Commodification, Translation, and the Culture Industry

The stories in the Thousand and One Nights, or the Arabian Nights, are familiar to many of us: from the tales of Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and his forty thieves, to the framing story of Scheherazade telling these stories to her homicidal husband, Shahrayar. This book offers a rich and wide-ranging analysis of the power of this collection of tales that penetrates so many cultures and appeals to such a variety of predilections and tastes. It also explores areas that were left untouched, like the decolonization of the Arabian Nights, and its archaeologies. Unique in its excavation into inroads of perception and reception, Muhsin J. al-Musawi's book unearths means of connection with common publics and learned societies. Al-Musawi shows, as never before, how the Arabian Nights has been translated, appropriated, and authenticated or abused over time, and how its reach is so expansive as to draw the attention of poets, painters, illustrators, translators, editors, musicians, political scientists like Leo Strauss, and novelists like Michel Butor, James Joyce and Marcel Proust amongst others. Making use of documentaries, films, paintings, novels and novellas, poetry, digital forums and political jargon, this book offers nuanced understanding of the perennial charm and power of this collection.

Author: Muhsin J. Al-Musawi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 08/26/2021
Pages: 344
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.65lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.94d
ISBN: 9781108474856


Review Citation(s):
Choice 10/01/2022

About the Author
Al-Musawi, Muhsin J.: - Muhsin J. al-Musawi is Professor of classical and modern Arabic literature, comparative and cultural studies at Columbia University in New York. He is the editor of the Journal of Arabic Literature and the recipient of the Owais Award in Literary Criticism in 2002, and the Kuwait Prize in Arabic language and literature in 2018. He is the author and editor of numerous books including, The Postcolonial Arabic Novel: Debating Ambivalence (2003), Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition (2006), Reading Iraq: Culture and Power in Conflict (2006), Arabic Literary Thresholds: Sites of Rhetorical Turn in Contemporary Scholarship (2009), The Islamic Context of the Thousand and One Nights, The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction, and Islam on the Street: Religion in Arabic Literature (2009), winner of 'Choice' Outstanding Academic Title in 2010.