Abstract
In 1797, expressing doubts about the accuracy of the translation of the Arabian Nights that Europe was familiar with, Richard Hole wrote:
We are of course as much acquainted with the merits of the original as we should be in respect to the former beauty of a human body from contemplating its skeleton.1
He was thus expressing, albeit prematurely, a preoccupation with the textual accuracy of the Arabian Nights that was to prevail in the nineteenth century. This was one manifestation of the quest for the historical origins of the tales. They appealed to the intellect seeking cultural data, and they became important as sociological document as well as diverting narrative. In the preface to his translation of the Arabian Nights, Henry Torrens delineated his intention as ‘less to give the incident of a tale, than the manners of a people’,2 This intention was to find its culmination with E. W. Lane’s translation, where the text is mainly a pretext for a long sociological discourse on the East.
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Notes and References
Richard Hole, Remarks on the Arabian Nights’ Entertainment (London, 1797) p. 10.
Henry Torrens, The Book of the 1001 Nights (London, 1838; 2 vols) vol. 1, p. iii.
Edward W. Lane, The Thousand and One Nights (London, 1839–41; 3 vols) vol. 3, p. 686.
Edward W. Lane, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (London, 1836; 1963) p. iii.
James Aldridge, Cairo (London, 1969) p. 12.
Joseph Pitts, A Faithful Account of the Religion and the Manners of the Mahometans (1704) (London, 1738) pp. 46–7.
Lord Cromer, Modern Egypt (London, 1908; 2 vols) vol. 2, p. 538.
Muhsin Jassim Ali, Scheherazade in England (Washington, 1981) pp. 93–4.
Kathryn Tidrick, Heart-Beguiling Araby (Cambridge, 1981) p. 66.
Richard Burton, Selected Papers on Anthropology, Travel and Exploration (London, 1924) p. 22.
Richard Burton, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (London, 1885–8; 17 vols) vol. I, p. 13.
Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters (London, 1983) p. 169.
Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men (New York, 1981) pp. 148–50.
Richard Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (London, 1855–6; 2 vols) vol. I, p. 9.
Thomas Assad, Three Victorian Travellers (London, 1964) p. 51.
A. Pope-Hennessey, Monckton Milnes: The Flight of Youth (London, 1963) pp. 67–9.
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal: Mémoires de la vie Littéraire (Paris, 1878; reprinted 1956; 4 vols) vol. I, p. 1053.
E. Hellerstein, L. Hume and K. M. Offen (eds) Victorian Women (London, 1981) p. 125.
Richard Burton, Zanzibar (London, 1872; 2 vols) vol. I, p. 184.
Talai Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London, 1973) pp. 13–15.
Richard Burton, A Mission to Geld e, King of Dahomey (London, 1864; 2 vols) vol. 2, p. 198.
George Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution (New York, 1968) p. 126.
John Haller, Outcasts from Evolution (Urbana, 1971) p. 51.
Burton, The Perfumed Garden (London, 1886) p. 6.
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© 1986 Rana Kabbani
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Kabbani, R. (1986). The Text as Pretext. In: Europe’s Myths of Orient. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07320-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07320-7_3
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