About the Book
Our foremost theorist of myth, fairytale, and folktale explores the magical realm of the imagination where carpets fly and genies grant prophetic wishes. Stranger Magic examines the profound impact of the Arabian Nights on the West, the progressive exoticization of magic, and the growing acceptance of myth and magic in contemporary experience.
Table of Contents:
Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction Part I: Solomon the Wise King Story 1: The Fisherman and the Genie Chapter 1: Master of Jinn Story 2: The City of Brass Chapter 2: Riding the Wind: The Flying Carpet I Story 3: Prince Ahmed and Fairy Peri Banou Chapter 3: A Tapestry of Great Price: The Flying Carpet II Part II: Dark Arts; Strange Gods Story 4: The Prince of the Black Islands Chapter 4: The Worst Witch Chapter 5: Egyptian Attitudes Story 5: Hasan of Basra Chapter 6: Magians and Dervishes Story 6: A Fortune Regained Chapter 7: Dream Knowledge Part III: Active Goods Chapter 8: ‘Everything You Desire to Know about the East . . .’ Story 7: The Greek King and Doctor Douban Chapter 9: The Thing-World of the Arabian Nights Story 8: Abu Mohammed the Lazy Chapter 10: The Word of the Talisman Story 9: Marouf the Cobbler Chapter 11: The Voice of the Toy Chapter 12: Money Talks Part IV: Oriental Masquerades Chapter 13: Magnificent Moustaches: Hamilton’s Fooling, Voltaire’s Impersonations Story 10: Rosebud and Uns al-Wujud the Darling Boy Story 11: The Jinniya and the Egyptian Prince Chapter 14: ‘Symbols of Wonder’: William Beckford’s Arabesque Chapter 15: Oriental Masquerade: Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan Part V: Flights of Reason Story 12: Camar al-Zaman and Princess Badoura Chapter 16: Thought Experiments: Flight before Flight Chapter 17: Why Aladdin? Chapter 18: Machine Dreams Story 13: The Ebony Horse Chapter 19: The Shadows of Lotte Reiniger Story 14: Aladdin of the Beautiful Moles Chapter 20: The Couch: A Case History Story 15: Prince Ardashir and Hayat al-Nufus Conclusion: ‘All the story of the night told over . . .’ Glossary Abbreviations The Stories Notes Bibliography Index
About the Author :
Warner Marina :
Marina Warner is Professor of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex and a distinguished writer of fiction, criticism, and history.
Review :
If we might forget how central [The Arabian Nights] tales are to our culture, Marina Warner's wondrous Stranger Magic is a scholarly excursion around some of the stories, her mind as rich and fascinating as the stories themselves, taking us on a magic carpet from Borges and Goethe, to Edward Said and the movies. -- Hanif Kureishi The Guardian 20111126 Stranger Magic is an enormous work, 436 densely erudite and eclectic pages plus another hundred of glossaries and notes. In its relentless connecting up of diverse stories, from the Inferno to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, it's reminiscent of Christopher Booker's brick-sized Seven Basic Plots. Warner's chapters, allocated into five parts, are beautifully illustrated and interspersed with 15 tales concisely retold...Stranger Magic is a scholarly work that often reads like a fireside conversation. It's encyclopedic, a book to be savored in slices. -- Robin Yassin-Kassab The Guardian 20111112 [A] wide-ranging, erudite, wondrously polymathic exploration of the tales of magic, bound to the "huge narrative wheel" with which Scheherazade enchanted the Sultan Shahryar through one thousand and one nights of storytelling. Warner, too, is a beguiling storyteller: her fascination with true knowledge embedded in realms of wonder. She releases the jinn of cultural modernism and scientific progress from the bottle in which it has been long confined by Western tradition. -- Iain Finlayson The Times 20111105 Wonderful...Warner is herself something of a Shahrazad, though she weaves her account under less threatening auspices...Many of the stories in the Nights take place in a legendary Baghdad or draw on older Persian sources, but a few--such as the story of Hayqar the Wise--date back to ancient Egyptian tales from the seventh century BC. Warner is alert to these earlier echoes but she is more interested in the far-reaching cultural and literary impact of the Nights on artists, composers and writers...From Voltaire and Goethe to Hans Christian Andersen and William Beckford down to Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino--on all of whom Warner offers illuminating discussions--the influence of the Nights has been pervasive; but composers (such as Mozart), artists and designers, illustrators and film-makers have also fallen under their spell. -- Eric Ormsby Literary Review 20111201 My favorite work of non-fiction this year was Marina Warner's Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights. In her exploration of this immense, protean and much-translated Arabic collection of folk and fairy tales (fifteen of them banded in here at intervals) she has found a subject which seems an ideal fit for her own particular cast of mind. This book is like one of the densely patterned carpets it describes, rich in overlapping narrative strands and in associative weave of thought. A gorgeous last chapter, "The Couch: A Case History," glides from the coded site of passion, the flying sofa, to the magic carpet via prayer mat, festive balcony hanging, nomadic house, Smyrna rug on Freud's analytical couch--recalling the structural importance of eavesdropping in the Arabian Nights--then a description of Gabbeh, an Iranian film about tribal carpet-weaving, and back to Freud and his thoughts on levitation and sexual delight (with a side swoop over Goethe's Faust calling for a magic cloak). -- Helen Simpson Times Literary Supplement 20111202 This learned, lively, and well-written book concerns the wide-ranging influence of The Arabian Nights--a polyvocal anthology of world myths, fables and fairy tales--on Western culture...Warner's densely detailed, loose, baggy monster of a book covers an impressive array of subjects from Voltaire and Goethe to Borges and Nabokov. -- Jeffrey Meyers Booklist 20120201 This remarkable study is an arabesque, and an intricate Persian rug of themes, eras, tales, and authors--of the Middle East and West, playing on "states of consciousness" as well as state-cultures. With a basic knowledge of Arabic from childhood as well as a Catholic upbringing, Warner is almost divinely positioned to unravel the infinite strands of the wily Scheherazade, as she weaves her way through the Arabian Nights, exploring their boundless capacity to "keep generating more tales, in various media, themselves different but alike: the stories themselves are shape-shifters." From Disney's Aladdin to the works of Freud, Goethe, Hans Christian Andersen, and others, Warner explores the impact of the Arabian Nights on the West and the power of enchantment and fantasy. Like all myth, these of flying carpets, sofas, and beds of genies and heroic connivers grant lasting insights into human aspirations, transcendence, and love. Carefully documented, Warner's ever shifting work takes its place alongside that of Edward Said, though she is refreshingly less polemical and less theoretical. No one need cover this enchanting ground again. Publishers Weekly (starred review) 20120123 Wondrous and lucid...When it comes to the tales themselves and their fantastical content, Warner is an excellent guide and a stylish storyteller in her own right: her renderings of 15 of the stories punctuate the book...The remarkable feat she has pulled off in Stranger Magic [is] nothing less than a history of magic, storytelling and centuries of cultural exchange between east and west. All in the guise of a book about one book, albeit an inexhaustible one. There are more dutiful histories of those subjects, just as there are scholarly studies of Arabian Nights that adequately describe its form, politics or translations but never truly fly. The product of Warner's meticulous research is a weighty volume that feels airborne on every page. -- Brian Dillon Irish Times 20120121 Insightful...It's fascinating and highly informed. -- Doug Johnstone Big Issue
