Arabian Night's Entertainments (Oxford World's Classics)

The stories contained in this "store house of ingenious fiction" initiate a pattern of literary reference and influence which today remains as powerful and intense as it was throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sinbad, Ali Baba, Aladdin: all make their appearance here. This edition reproduces in its entirety the earliest English translation of the French orientalist Antoine Galland's Mille et une Nuits (1001 Nights), which remained for over a century the only English translation of the story cycle, influencing an incalculable number of writers. In addition, it offers the complete text or the tales supplemented by extensive explanatory notes and plot summaries, which are particularly vital as these expansive stories are complex and interwoven.