SOURCE: Moussa-Mahmoud, Fatma. “English Travellers and the Arabian Nights.” In The Arabian Nights in English Literature, edited by Peter L. Caracciolo, pp. 95-110. London, England: Macmillan, 1988.

In the following essay, Moussa-Mahmoud presents a brief survey of English travel literature influenced by the tales of The Arabian Nights.

In the opening years of the eighteenth century the strange distant East was brought vividly and imaginatively before the eyes of French and English readers with Antoine Galland's translation of the Nights into French (1704-17). The French version was immediately translated into English and the tales were so popular that they started a literary fashion on both sides of the Channel, the ‘oriental tale’ of the eighteenth century.¹ There were so many preposterous imitations of the Nights that some genuine translations such as the Persian Tales (1710) and the New Arabian Nights (1792) were long taken for forgeries. As travelling to the East...