1907 1ed Arabian Nights Edmund Dulac Illustrated PLATES Islam Arabic 1001 Nights

50 INCREDIBLE Tipped-in Engravings / See Photos

 

One Thousand and One Nights a collection of West and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the Arabian Nights, from the first English language edition (1706), which rendered the title as The Arabian Nights' Entertainment.

 

Edmund Dulac (1882 – 1953) was a French-born, British naturalised magazine illustrator, book illustrator and stamp designer. Born in Toulouse he studied law but later turned to the study of art the École des Beaux-Arts. He moved to London early in the 20th century and in 1905 received his first commission to illustrate the novels of the Brontë Sisters. During World War I, Dulac produced relief books and when after the war the deluxe children's book market shrank he turned to magazine illustrations among other ventures. He designed banknotes during World War II and postage stamps, most notably those that heralded the beginning of Queen Elizabeth II's reign.

 

Main author: Laurence Housman; Edmund Dulac (illust.)

 

Title: Stories from the Arabian Nights. Retold by Laurence Housman. With drawings by Edmund Dulac.

 

Published: New York: Scribner’s and Sons; London: Hodder & Soughton, 1907.

 

Language:  English

 

Notes & contents:

·       1st American edition

·       50 incredible tipped-in engravings by Dulac

 

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Wear: wear as seen in photos

Binding: tight and secure binding

Pages: complete with all xvi + 133 pages; plus indexes, prefaces, and such

Publisher: London: Hodder & Soughton, 1907.

Size: ~9.5in X 7in (24cm x 17.5cm)

 

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One Thousand and One Nights (Arabic: كتاب ألف ليلة وليلة‎ Kitāb alf laylah wa-laylah) is a collection of West and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the Arabian Nights, from the first English language edition (1706), which rendered the title as The Arabian Nights' Entertainment.[1]

The work was collected over many centuries by various authors, translators, and scholars across West, Central, South Asia and North Africa. The tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Indian, Egyptian and Mesopotamian folklore and literature. In particular, many tales were originally folk stories from the Caliphate era, while others, especially the frame story, are most probably drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hazār Afsān (Persian: هزار افسان‎, lit. A Thousand Tales) which in turn relied partly on Indian elements.[2]

What is common throughout all the editions of the Nights is the initial frame story of the ruler Shahryār (from Persian: شهريار‎, meaning "king" or "sovereign") and his wife Scheherazade (from Persian: شهرزاد‎, possibly meaning "of noble lineage"[3]) and the framing device incorporated throughout the tales themselves. The stories proceed from this original tale; some are framed within other tales, while others begin and end of their own accord. Some editions contain only a few hundred nights, while others include 1,001 or more. The bulk of the text is in prose, although verse is occasionally used to express heightened emotion, and for songs and riddles. Most of the poems are single couplets or quatrains, although some are longer.

Some of the stories of The Nights, particularly "Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp", "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" and "The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor", while almost certainly genuine Middle Eastern folk tales, were not part of The Nights in Arabic versions, but were added into the collection by Antoine Galland and other European translators.[4]

Contents  [hide]

1 Synopsis

2 History: versions and translations

2.1 Possible Indian origins

2.2 Persian prototype: Hazār Afsān

2.3 Arabic versions

2.4 Modern translations

2.5 Timeline

3 Literary themes and techniques

3.1 Frame story

3.2 Embedded narrative

3.3 Dramatic visualization

3.4 Fate and destiny

3.5 Foreshadowing

3.6 Repetition

3.7 Sexual humour

3.8 Unreliable narrator

3.9 Crime fiction elements

3.10 Horror fiction elements

3.11 Fantasy and science fiction elements

3.12 The Arabic poetry in One Thousand and One Nights

4 In world culture

4.1 In Arabic culture

4.2 Possible early influence on European literature

4.3 Western literature from the 18th century onwards

4.4 Cinema

4.5 Music

4.6 Video games

4.7 Illustrators

5 See also

6 Notes

7 Sources

8 Further reading

9 External links

Synopsis[edit]

See also: List of stories within One Thousand and One Nights and List of characters within One Thousand and One Nights

The main frame story concerns a Persian king and his new bride. He is shocked to discover that his brother's wife is unfaithful; discovering his own wife's infidelity has been even more flagrant, he has her executed: but in his bitterness and grief decides that all women are the same. The king, Shahryar, begins to marry a succession of virgins only to execute each one the next morning, before she has a chance to dishonour him. Eventually the vizier, whose duty it is to provide them, cannot find any more virgins. Scheherazade, the vizier's daughter, offers herself as the next bride and her father reluctantly agrees. On the night of their marriage, Scheherazade begins to tell the king a tale, but does not end it. The king, curious about how the story ends, is thus forced to postpone her execution in order to hear the conclusion. The next night, as soon as she finishes the tale, she begins (and only begins) a new one, and the king, eager to hear the conclusion, postpones her execution once again. So it goes on for 1,001 nights.

The tales vary widely: they include historical tales, love stories, tragedies, comedies, poems, burlesques and various forms of erotica. Numerous stories depict jinns, ghouls, apes,[5] sorcerers, magicians, and legendary places, which are often intermingled with real people and geography, not always rationally; common protagonists include the historical Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, his Grand Vizier, Jafar al-Barmaki, and the famous poet Abu Nuwas, despite the fact that these figures lived some 200 years after the fall of the Sassanid Empire in which the frame tale of Scheherazade is set. Sometimes a character in Scheherazade's tale will begin telling other characters a story of his own, and that story may have another one told within it, resulting in a richly layered narrative texture.

 

 

A manuscript of the One Thousand and One Nights

The different versions have different individually detailed endings (in some Scheherazade asks for a pardon, in some the king sees their children and decides not to execute his wife, in some other things happen that make the king distracted) but they all end with the king giving his wife a pardon and sparing her life.

The narrator's standards for what constitutes a cliffhanger seem broader than in modern literature. While in many cases a story is cut off with the hero in danger of losing his life or another kind of deep trouble, in some parts of the full text Scheherazade stops her narration in the middle of an exposition of abstract philosophical principles or complex points of Islamic philosophy, and in one case during a detailed description of human anatomy according to Galen—and in all these cases turns out to be justified in her belief that the king's curiosity about the sequel would buy her another day of life.

History: versions and translations[edit]

 

 

Princess Dunyazade.

The history of the Nights is extremely complex and modern scholars have made many attempts to untangle the story of how the collection as it currently exists came about. Robert Irwin summarises their findings: "In the 1880s and 1890s a lot of work was done on the Nights by [the scholar] Zotenberg and others, in the course of which a consensus view of the history of the text emerged. Most scholars agreed that the Nights was a composite work and that the earliest tales in it came from India and Persia. At some time, probably in the early 8th century, these tales were translated into Arabic under the title Alf Layla, or 'The Thousand Nights'. This collection then formed the basis of The Thousand and One Nights. The original core of stories was quite small. Then, in Iraq in the 9th or 10th century, this original core had Arab stories added to it – among them some tales about the Caliph Harun al-Rashid. Also, perhaps from the 10th century onwards, previously independent sagas and story cycles were added to the compilation [...] Then, from the 13th century onwards, a further layer of stories was added in Syria and Egypt, many of these showing a preoccupation with sex, magic or low life. In the early modern period yet more stories were added to the Egyptian collections so as to swell the bulk of the text sufficiently to bring its length up to the full 1,001 nights of storytelling promised by the book’s title."[6]

Possible Indian origins[edit]

Some scholars have seen an ultimate Indian origin for the Nights. The collection makes use of devices found in Sanskrit literature such as frame stories and animal fables.[7] Indian folklore is represented in the Nights by certain animal stories, which reflect influence from ancient Sanskrit fables. The influence of the Panchatantra and Baital Pachisi is particularly notable.[8] The Jataka Tales are a collection of 547 Buddhist stories, which are for the most part moral stories with an ethical purpose. The Tale of the Bull and the Ass and the linked Tale of the Merchant and his Wife are found in the frame stories of both the Jataka and the Nights.[9]

It is possible that the influence of the Panchatantra is via a Sanskrit adaptation called the Tantropakhyana. Only fragments of the original Sanskrit form of this work exist, but translations or adaptations exist in Tamil,[10] Lao,[11] Thai[12] and Old Javanese.[13] The frame story is particularly interesting, as it follows the broad outline of a concubine telling stories in order to maintain the interest and favour of a king - although the basis of the collection of stories is from the Panchatantra - with its original Indian setting.