Stranger magic [electronic resource] : charmed states and The Arabian nights / Marina Warner.
Warner, Marina, 1946-
2012
PJ7737 .W37 2012eb
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Title Stranger magic [electronic resource] : charmed states and The Arabian nights / Marina Warner.
Author Warner, Marina, 1946-
ISBN 9780674065079 electronic book
9780674055308
Imprint Cambridge, MA : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012.
Language English
Description 1 online resource (xx, 540 p.) : ill. (some col.)
Call Number PJ7737 .W37 2012eb
Dewey Decimal Classification 398.22
Summary Our foremost theorist of myth, fairytales, and folktales explores the magical realm of the imagination where carpets fly, objects speak, dreams reveal hidden truths, and genies grant prophetic wishes. Stranger Magic examines the wondrous tales of the Arabian Nights, their profound impact on the West, and the progressive exoticization of magic since the eighteenth century, when the first European translations appeared. The Nights seized European readers' imaginations during the siècle des Lumières, inspiring imitations, spoofs, turqueries, extravaganzas, pantomimes, and mauresque tastes in dress and furniture. Writers from Voltaire to Goethe to Borges, filmmakers from Raoul Walsh on, and countless authors of children's books have adapted its stories. What gives these tales their enduring power to bring pleasure to readers and audiences? Their appeal, Marina Warner suggests, lies in how the stories' magic stimulates the creative activity of the imagination. Their popularity during the Enlightenment was no accident: dreams, projections, and fantasies are essential to making the leap beyond the frontiers of accepted knowledge into new scientific and literary spheres. The magical tradition, so long disavowed by Western rationality, underlies modernity's most characteristic developments, including the charmed states of brand-name luxury goods, paper money, and psychoanalytic dream interpretation. In Warner's hands, the Nights reveal the underappreciated cultural exchanges between East and West, Islam and Christianity, and cast light on the magical underpinnings of contemporary experience, where mythical principles, as distinct from religious belief, enjoy growing acceptance. These tales meet the need for enchantment, in the safe guise of oriental costume.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references and index.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
Source of Description Description based on print version record.
Available in Other Form Stranger magic.
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Solomon the wise king. The fisherman and the genie ; Master of jinn ; The city of brass ; Riding the wind : the flying carpet I ; Prince Ahmed and Fairy Peri Banou ; A tapestry of great price : the flying carpet II
Dark arts, strange Gods. The prince of the Black Islands ; The worst witch ; Egyptian attitudes ; Hasan of Basra ; Magians and dervishes ; A fortune regained ; Dream knowledge
Active goods. 'Everything you desire to know about the East...' ; The Greek king and Doctor Douban ; The thing-world of the Arabian Nights ; Abu Mohammed the Lazy ; The world of the talisman ; Marouf the cobbler ; The voice of the toy ; Money talks
Oriental masquerades. Magnificent moustaches : Hamilton's fooling, Voltaire's impersonations ; Rosebud and Uns al-Wujud the darling boy ; The jinniya and the Egyptian prince ; 'Symbols of wonder' : William Beckford's arabesque ; Oriental masquerade ; Goethe's West-Eastern Divan
Flights of reason. Camar al-Zaman and Princess Badoura ; Thought experiments : flight before flight ; Why Aladdin? ; Machine dreams ; The ebony horse ; The shadows of Lotte Reiniger ; Aladdin of the beautiful moles ; The couch : a case history ; Prince Ardashir and Hayat al-Nufus
'All the story of the night told over ...
'.

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