Author | Robert Louis Stevenson |
---|---|
Language | English |
Genre | Short stories |
Publisher | Chatto & Windus |
Publication date | 1882 |
Publication place | Scotland |
Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
Followed by | More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter |
New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson, first published in 1882, is a collection of short stories previously published in magazines between 1877 and 1880. The collection contains Stevenson's first published fiction, and a few of the stories are considered by some critics to be his best work, as well as pioneering works in the English-language short story tradition. [1] [2]
New Arabian Nights is divided into two volumes.
Volume 1
The first volume contains seven stories originally called Later-day Arabian Nights and published by London Magazine in serial format from June to October 1878. It is composed of two story groups, or cycles:
Volume 2
The second volume is a collection of four unconnected (standalone) stories that were previously published in magazines:
The title is an allusion to the collection of tales known as the One Thousand and One Nights , which Stevenson had read and liked. Although Stevenson's stories were set in modern Europe, he was stylistically drawing a connection to the nested structure of the Arabian tales.
As in A Thousand and One Nights, where we have a caliph named Harun the Orthodox, who wanders through the streets of Baghdad in disguise, here in The New Arabian Nights by Stevenson, we have Prince Florizel of Bohemia, who wanders through the streets of London in disguise.
Two eagerly awaited translations of the Arabian Nights, by Richard F. Burton and John Payne, were in the works in the late 1870s and early 1880s, further helping to draw popular attention to Stevenson's "New" title. [4]
"A Lodging for the Night" was Stevenson's first ever published fiction. In 1890 Arthur Conan Doyle characterized "The Pavilion on the Links" as "the high-water mark of Stevenson's genius" and "the first short-story in the world". [2] Barry Menikoff (1987) considers New Arabian Nights to be the starting point in the history of the English-language short story. [1]
Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer. He is best known for works such as Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped and A Child's Garden of Verses.
A short story is a piece of prose fiction. It can typically be read in a single sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the oldest types of literature and has existed in the form of legends, mythic tales, folk tales, fairy tales, tall tales, fables, and anecdotes in various ancient communities around the world. The modern short story developed in the early 19th century.
Arthur Machen was the pen-name of Arthur Llewellyn Jones, a Welsh author and mystic of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His novella The Great God Pan has garnered a reputation as a classic of horror, with Stephen King describing it as "Maybe the best [horror story] in the English language." He is also well known for "The Bowmen", a short story that was widely read as fact, creating the legend of the Angels of Mons.
One Thousand and One Nights, ) is a collection of Middle Eastern folktales compiled in the Arabic language during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the Arabian Nights, from the first English-language edition, which rendered the title as The Arabian Nights' Entertainment.
Andrew Lang was a Scottish poet, novelist, literary critic, and contributor to the field of anthropology. He is best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales. The Andrew Lang lectures at the University of St Andrews are named after him.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1877.
Antoine Galland was a French orientalist and archaeologist, most famous as the first European translator of One Thousand and One Nights, which he called Les mille et une nuits. His version of the tales appeared in twelve volumes between 1704 and 1717 and exerted a significant influence on subsequent European literature and attitudes to the Islamic world. Jorge Luis Borges has suggested that Romanticism began when his translation was first read.
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This is a bibliography of works by Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet, and translator Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986).
Frances Matilda Van de Grift Osbourne Stevenson was an American magazine writer. She became a supporter and later the wife of Robert Louis Stevenson, and the mother of Isobel Osbourne, Samuel Lloyd Osbourne, and Hervey Stewart Osbourne.
The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1888), subtitled A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, is the only complete English language translation of One Thousand and One Nights to date – a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age – by the British explorer and Arabist Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890). It stands as the only complete translation of the Macnaghten or Calcutta II edition of the "Arabian Nights".
The Exotic Enchanter is an anthology of four fantasy short stories edited by American writers L. Sprague de Camp and Christopher Stasheff. The Exotic Enchanter is the second volume in the continuation of the Harold Shea series by de Camp and Fletcher Pratt. It was first published in paperback by Baen Books in 1995; an ebook edition followed from the same publisher in September 2013. All the pieces are original to the anthology.
Island Nights' Entertainments is a collection of short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, first published in 1893. It would prove to contain some of his final completed work before his death in 1894.
"The Pavilion on the Links" (1880) is a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson. It was first published in Cornhill Magazine. A revised version was included in New Arabian Nights (1882).
The Suicide Club is an 1878 collection of three 19th century detective fiction short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson that combine to form a single narrative. First published in the London Magazine in 1878, they were collected and republished in the first volume of the New Arabian Nights.
The Rajah's Diamond is a cycle of four short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson. First published in 1878 in a serial periodical London Magazine, they were republished in the first volume of New Arabian Nights. The stories are:
"The Beach of Falesá" is a novella by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. It was first published in the Illustrated London News in 1892, and later published in book form in the short-story collection Island Nights' Entertainments (1893). It was written after Stevenson moved to the South Seas island of Samoa just a few years before he died there.
Richard Weston Burgin was an American fiction writer, editor, composer, critic, and academic. He published nineteen books, and from 1996 through 2013 was a professor of Communications and English at Saint Louis University. He was also the founder and publisher of the internationally distributed award-winning literary magazine Boulevard.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens , well known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. Twain is noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which has been called the "Great American Novel," and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). He also wrote poetry, short stories, essays, and non-fiction. His big break was "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (1867).