Cultural Encounters with the Arabian Nights in Nineteenth-Century Britain / / Melissa Dickson.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Edinburgh University Press Complete eBook-Package 2019
• VerfasserIn: Dickson, Melissa,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2019
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture : ECSVC
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (232 p.) :; 10 B/W illustrations

An overview of the cultural transmission of the Arabian Nights within nineteenth-century BritainFresh readings of canonical texts such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’s Hard Times and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in WonderlandDiverse primary sources analysing the presence of the Arabian Nights in distinct areas of cultural production: constructions of childhood, archaeological and geological science, theatrical display, and exhibitionsAladdin, Sinbad, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Scheherazade winding out her intricate tales to win her nightly stay of execution: the stories of the Arabian Nights are a familiar and much-loved part of the English literary inheritance. But how did these tales become so much a part of the British cultural landscape?Dickson identifies the nineteenth century as the beginning of the large-scale absorption of the Arabian Nights into British literature and culture. She explores how this period used the stories as a means of articulating its own experiences of a rapidly changing environment. She also argues for a view of these tales not as a depiction of otherness, but as a site of recognition and imaginative exchange between East and West, in a period when such common ground was rarely found

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- A Note on the Text -- Series Editor’s Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Chapter 1 ‘For a time their world made mine’: Childhood Encounters with the Arabian Nights -- Chapter 2 Underground Palaces and Castles in the Air: The Realms and Ruins of the Arabian Nights -- Chapter 3 The Magical Metropolis -- Chapter 4 Magic and Machines at the Great Exhibition -- Chapter 5 Epilogue: A New Arabian Nights -- Bibliography -- Index