ABSTRACT
Publication of the fi rst volume of The Arabian Nights in English in the year 1706 saw the beginning of the central role of a single set of tales in forming
the exotic mental landscape named ‘Araby’ in popular culture. The addition of the epithet ‘Arabian’ to the title of the sequence of tales known in French as the ‘thousand and one nights’ signalled the advent of a new orientalism. ‘Like a dance craze or a charismatic cult, The Arabian Nights seized readers’ imaginations as soon as translations fi rst appeared. . . . Oriental fever swept through salons and coffee-houses’—so Marina Warner1 describes that initial shock of the new. Peter Caracciolo’s edited collection of essays, The Arabian Nights in English Literature (1988), uncovers a remarkable history of the permeation of English letters by the stylised ‘otherness’ of these tales, from Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abbyssinia [sic] (1759) to the device of the frame story in Dickens’ Master Humphrey’s Clock, and references to the Nights in the novels of Henry James.
