Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights - Hardcover

Warner, Marina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674055306 ISBN 13: 9780674055308

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2012

Synopsis

Our foremost theorist of myth, fairytales, and folktales explores the magical realm of the imagination where carpets fly, objects speak, dreams reveal hidden truths, and genies grant prophetic wishes. "Stranger Magic" examines the wondrous tales of the "Arabian Nights, " their profound impact on the West, and the progressive exoticization of magic since the eighteenth century, when the first European translations appeared.

The "Nights" seized European readers' imaginations during the siecle des Lumieres, inspiring imitations, spoofs, turqueries, extravaganzas, pantomimes, and mauresque tastes in dress and furniture. Writers from Voltaire to Goethe to Borges, filmmakers from Raoul Walsh on, and countless authors of children's books have adapted its stories. What gives these tales their enduring power to bring pleasure to readers and audiences? Their appeal, Marina Warner suggests, lies in how the stories' magic stimulates the creative activity of the imagination. Their popularity during the Enlightenment was no accident: dreams, projections, and fantasies are essential to making the leap beyond the frontiers of accepted knowledge into new scientific and literary spheres. The magical tradition, so long disavowed by Western rationality, underlies modernity's most characteristic developments, including the charmed states of brand-name luxury goods, paper money, and psychoanalytic dream interpretation.

In Warner's hands, the "Nights" reveal the underappreciated cultural exchanges between East and West, Islam and Christianity, and cast light on the magical underpinnings of contemporary experience, where mythical principles, as distinct from religious belief, enjoy growing acceptance. These tales meet the need for enchantment, in the safe guise of oriental costume."

About this title

Review:

"Marina Warner's essays and lectures reveal a consistently honest and agile mind preoccupied with the powerful controlling fictions of our lives."
"--Observer

""She is a terrific writer and an original scholar.""
--"Victoria Glendinning", Daily Telegraph
"

If we might forget how central ["The Arabian Nights"] tales are to our culture, Marina Warner's wondrous "Stranger Magic" is a scholarly excursion around some of the stories, her mind as rich and fascinating as the stories themselves, taking us on a magic carpet from Borges and Goethe, to Edward Said and the movies.--Hanif Kureishi"The Guardian" (11/26/2011)

Insightful...It's fascinating and highly informed.--Doug Johnstone "Big Issue "

Wonderful...Warner is herself something of a Shahrazad, though she weaves her account under less threatening auspices...Many of the stories in the "Nights" take place in a legendary Baghdad or draw on older Persian sources, but a few--such as the story of Hayqar the Wise--date back to ancient Egyptian tales from the seventh century BC. Warner is alert to these earlier echoes but she is more interested in the far-reaching cultural and literary impact of the "Nights" on artists, composers and writers...From Voltaire and Goethe to Hans Christian Andersen and William Beckford down to Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino--on all of whom Warner offers illuminating discussions--the influence of the "Nights" has been pervasive; but composers (such as Mozart), artists and designers, illustrators and film-makers have also fallen under their spell.--Eric Ormsby"Literary Review" (12/01/2011)

[A] wide-ranging, erudite, wondrously polymathic exploration of the tales of magic, bound to the "huge narrative wheel" with which Scheherazade enchanted the Sultan Shahryar through one thousand and one nights of storytelling. Warner, too, is a beguiling storyteller: her fascination with true knowledge embedded in realms of wonder. She releases the jinn of cultural modernism and scientific progress from the bottle in which it has been long confined by Western tradition.--Iain Finlayson"The Times" (11/05/2011)

Wondrous and lucid...When it comes to the tales themselves and their fantastical content, Warner is an excellent guide and a stylish storyteller in her own right: her renderings of 15 of the stories punctuate the book...The remarkable feat she has pulled off in "Stranger Magic" [is] nothing less than a history of magic, storytelling and centuries of cultural exchange between east and west. All in the guise of a book about one book, albeit an inexhaustible one. There are more dutiful histories of those subjects, just as there are scholarly studies of "Arabian Nights" that adequately describe its form, politics or translations but never truly fly. The product of Warner's meticulous research is a weighty volume that feels airborne on every page.--Brian Dillon"Irish Times" (01/21/2012)

This learned, lively, and well-written book concerns the wide-ranging influence of "The Arabian Nights"--a polyvocal anthology of world myths, fables and fairy tales--on Western culture...Warner's densely detailed, loose, baggy monster of a book covers an impressive array of subjects from Voltaire and Goethe to Borges and Nabokov.--Jeffrey Meyers"Booklist" (02/01/2012)

More even than an inquisitive, authoritative study of one of the greatest imaginative enterprises of human history, this is a further chapter in Warner's unfolding of the power--the magical power as it may be--of the magical imagination...Some of the most original and compelling arguments in Stranger Magic concern the uses of Arabian flights of fantasy as vehicles for scientific and technological speculation...Jung said that the job of the mythographer might be not so much to spell out the meaning of myth as to "dream the myth onward." This is in a sense what Warner has undertaken to do, for her account of The Arabian Nights and their transmigrations is itself knitted into the fabric of the history she presents. Each section of her account is prefaced by a retelling of one of the stories, usually a neglected or less well known one, and in the writing and the reading, the separate threads of her argument--her accounts of the history of magic, or the responses of particular writers to the stories, or the nature of magical things, or the politics of enchantment--pass under and over each other. Warner's scholarly imagination has never been less than compendious, but it has never before been so intricately wrought, or drawn together with such ingenuity the hitherto distinct currents of her writing, as mythographer, fabulist, critic, speculator and polemicist.--Steven Connor"London Review of Books" (03/22/2012)

Warner has long been recognized as one of the foremost scholars of the fairy tale and myth. Here, she brings her characteristic erudition and insight to one of the great works of world literature, The Arabian Nights, using the best-known as well as some of the lesser-known stories to demonstrate how the Nights contributed to the rise of magical thinking across European and world culture...She ably demonstrates how the tales loom large in European culture and have provided the basis for much creativity and imagination since their discovery by the West in the 18th century...General readers and scholars in folklore, history, and Arabic literature alike will appreciate Warner's ability to make connections between the Nights and the way the stories have resonated over time and space.--David S. Azzolina"Library Journal" (04/15/2012)

In Stranger Magic Warner surveys just how pervasively The Arabian Nights has influenced art and literature since the eighteenth century. On the surface, her book covers what more dogmatic critics would call the West's cultural appropriation of the East...Stranger Magic is packed with information and insight...Warner writes with clarity, and sometimes with exquisite beauty...Warner possesses an exceptionally synoptic mind, almost Sherlockian in its sensitivity to connections and repeated motifs...Stranger Magic is, in fact, simply the latest in an exhilarating series of studies that reexamine the West's fantastic imagination. From the Beast to the Blonde, No Go the Bogeyman, and Phantasmagoria explore the cultural meanings of folktales and Mother Goose stories, children's literature, and fairy tales, the fearful monsters, beasts, and ogres of nightmare, and all the ways humankind has attempted to represent the spiritual. Ranged together, these substantial works, now joined by Stranger Magic, look solid and magisterial on the bookshelf, calling to mind the encyclopedic scholarship we associate with an earlier age. Nonetheless, while Marina Warner is as learned as any Victorian polymath, she also employs contemporary feminist theory and the insights of cultural studies to make us look once more, or look more deeply, at the history of cinema, art, theater, and literature. Each of her books is an Aladdin's cave of wonders.--Michael Dirda"Barnes & Noble Review" (05/18/2012)

Book Description:

A dazzling history of magical thinking, exploring the power of the Arabian Nights and its impact in the West, and retelling some of its wondrous tales. Lavishly illustrated throughout.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0674055306
• ISBN 13: 9780674055308
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 560