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Few works of literature are as familiar and beloved as
The Arabian Nights. Yet few remain also as unknown. In English,
The Arabian Nights is a literary work of relatively recent date-the first versions of the tales appeared in English barely two hundred years ago. The tales are accompanied by a preface, a note on the text, and explanatory annotations.
"Contexts" presents three of the oldest witnesses to
The Arabian Nights in the Arabic tradition, together in English for the first time: an anonymous ninth-century fragment, Al Mas'udi's Muruj al-Dhahab, and Ibn al-Nadim's
The Fihrist. Also included are three related works by the nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers Edgar Allan Poe, Marcel Proust, and Taha Husayn.
"Criticism" collects eleven wide-ranging essays on
The Arabian Nights' central themes by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Josef Horovitz, Jorge Luis Borges, Francesco Gabrieli, Mia Irene Gerhardt, Tzvetan Todorov, Andras Hamori, Heinz Grotzfield, Jerome W. Clinton, Abdelfattah Kilito, and David Pinault.
A Chronology of
The Arabian Nights and a Selected Bibliography are also included.
About the author
Daniel Heller-Roazen, geb. 1974, ist Professor für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft an der Princeton University. Er studierte Philosophie und Literaturwissenschaft in Toronto, Baltimore, Venedig und Paris und hat zahlreiche Stipendien für seine Arbeit erhalten. Im Jahr 2010 wurde ihm die Medaille des Collège de France verliehen.
Summary
This Norton Critical Edition includes twenty-eight tales from The Arabian Nights translated by Husain Haddawy on the basis of the oldest existing Arabic manuscript.
