Arabian Nights' Entertainments (Oxford World's Classics) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192834797 ISBN 13: 9780192834799

Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks, 1998

Synopsis

No other edition offers extensive textual apparatus such as explanatory notes, plot summaries, particularly vital as stories are complex and interwoven. The Sultan Schahriar's misguided resolution to shelter himself from the possible infidelities on his wives leads to an outbreak of barbarity in his kingdoms and a reign of terror in his court, stopped only by the resourceful Scheherazade. The tales with which Scheherazade nightly postpones the muderous intent of the sultan have entered our language and our lives like no other collection of narratives before or since. Sinbad, Aladdin, Ali Baba: all make their spectacular entrance on to the stage of English literary history in the Arabian Nights Entertainments (1704-17). The stories contained in this `store house of ingenious fiction' initiate a pattern of literary reference and influence which today remains as powerful and intense as it was throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This edition reproduces in its entirety the earliest English translation of the French orientalist Antoine Galland's Mille et une Nuits. This remained for over a century the only English translation of the story cycle, influencing an incalculable number of writers, and no other edition offers the complete text supplemented by full textual apparatus.

About this title

About the Author:

Robert L. Mack is a writer and editor who has worked on a number of volumes for Oxford World's Classics. He is the author of Thomas Gray: A Life.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0192834797
• ISBN 13: 9780192834799
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 976
• Editor: Mack Robert L.