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'This wonderful book shows how firmly the Arabian Nights was embedded in the British cultural psyche during the nineteenth century. From childhood reading through to stage performances and the narratives of archaeology and industrial modernity, this astute study tracks the ways in which the Arabian Nights wove its own forms of entrancement. Dickson's subtle text calls for a recalibration of our understandings of 'Orientalism' in the nineteenth century.'
Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford
An overview of the cultural transmission of the Arabian Nights within nineteenth-century Britain
Aladdin, 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
Melissa Dickson is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Birmingham.
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edinburghuniversitypress.com
ISBN 978-1-4744-4364-7
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List of contents
List of Illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. 'For a time their world made mine': Childhood Encounters with the Arabian Nights; 2. Underground Palaces and Castles in the Air: The Realms and Ruins of the Arabian Nights; 3. The Magical Metropolis; 4. Magic and Machines at the Great Exhibition; 5. Epilogue: A New Arabian Nights; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Dr Melissa Dickson is an ECR-funded researcher at St Anne's College Oxford. Her publications include
Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain, co-authored with Ameila Bonea, Sally Shuttleworth and Jennifer Wallis (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 'Jane Eyre's 'Arabian Tales': Reading and Remembering the Arabian Nights',
Journal of Victorian Culture, 18:2 (2013) and 'Charles Wheatstone's Enchanted Lyre and the Spectacle of Sound' in
Sound Knowledge: Music and Science in London, 1789-1851, ed. by Ellen Lockhart and James Q. Davies (University of Chicago Press, 2017).
