Motivated fictionality: Worldbuilding and The Thousand and One Nights

Abstract

Inundated with visions of domed desert kingdoms, tyrant kings, flying carpets, and shapeshifting jinn, the visual vocabulary that has come to be associated with The Thousand and One Nights can be traced back to the earliest illustrated translations of the stories, one of the first of which was British orientalist Edward Lane’s three volume edition published between 1839–41. Interspersed with the 635 woodcut prints designed for the edition by illustrator William Harvey, this version developed an identity for the Nights rooted in ethnographically realist art and annotation. Since much of Lane’s own travel research was folded into the Nights through choice commentary and renderings, key illustrations are closely read here as having channeled the translator’s own scholarly motivations into the world of the stories. Embraced not just as a work of storytelling, but also of worldbuilding, the Nights are positioned in this essay as a world ripe with and receptive to interventions where the work of writing and visualizing fiction is indivisible from the construction and perception of reality.