The Arabian nights in English literature : studies in the reception of The thousand and one nights into British culture

Front Matter....Pages i-xxix Introduction: ‘Such a store house of ingenious fiction and of splendid imagery’....Pages 1-80 Scheherazade in the Nursery....Pages 81-94 English Travellers and the Arabian Nights....Pages 95-110 The Genie and the Albatross: Coleridge and the Arabian Nights....Pages 111-129 Dickens in Wonderland....Pages 130-142 Wilkie Collins and the Ladies of Baghdad, or the Sleeper Awakened....Pages 143-177 Cayenne and Cream Tarts: W. M. Thackeray and R. L. Stevenson....Pages 178-196 The Victorian Scheherazade: Elizabeth Gaskell and George Meredith....Pages 197-217 The Genie out of the Bottle: Conrad, Wells and Joyce....Pages 218-243 ‘A Lesson for the Circumspect’: W. B. Yeats’s Two Versions of A Vision and the Arabian Nights....Pages 244-280 The King of the Black Islands and the Myth of the Waste Land....Pages 281-284 Back Matter....Pages 285-330 A collection of essays which attempts to chart the influence of Arabian stories on English literature since Chaucer's day. In the tales of Scheherezade, the contributors claim, lie some of the origins of genres such as the novel, detective story and science fiction.