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The Arabian Nights and Orientalism: Perspectives from East and West. Edited by Yuriko Yamanaka and Tetsuo Nishio. With an introduction by Robert Irwin. London: I. B. Taurus, 2006. 269pp.
This collection of essays is the product of one of the many conferences held in 2004 in commemoration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Antoine Galland's translation. The conference was held in Osaka, Japan, and six of the essays were written by Japanese scholars, which makes this collection especially interesting; as Robert Irwin notes in his preface, the history of the Nights in Japanese culture complicates the notion of "Orientalism."
The essays are presented under three headings: "Motifs and Formulas," "Sources and Influences," and "Text and Image." Under the first heading are essays by Ulrich Marzolph, Hasan El-Shamy, Kathrin Muller, and Etsuko Aoyagi. Marzolph's essay, "The Arabian Nights in Comparative Folk Narrative Research," describes the influence of the Nights on "folk narrative research," and concludes with an eight-page index of the tale types in the major European translations. "Mythological Constituents oïAlflaylah wa laylah" by Hasan ElShamy, explores "some of the quasi-sacred (religious) and the quasi-historical components" found in a recent Arabic edition, which are again categorized according to the Aarne-Thompson indexes. Kathrin Muller's essay, "Formulas and Formulaic Pictures: Elements of Oral Eiterature in the Thousand and One Nights" describes three sorts of formulas: introductory, concluding, and transitional. The next essay, "Repetitiveness in the Arabian Nights: Openness as Self Foundation," by Etsuko Aoyagi, treats the same general issue but from a decidedly different perspective, a Derridean perspective on the relations...