Sheherazade through the looking glass

the long version

"The Thousand and One Nights was secular literature, not approved by the cultured literary classes as literature at all. It existed as a popular entertainment and much of it expressed the desires, wishes and experiences of a middle to lower class urban and mercantile people. However, that is what it was, once. What it is now is infinitely more complex because it was reborn into an alien environment in 1704, an environment in which its signs were received in a radically different way from their accepted meanings in their culture of birth. Not only were most of its referents unknown, but its signs took on a reference unique to them, a reference to a general system of imaginative perception in which one of the essential components was mystery and a sense of being cut loose from meaning." "Works of literature change as people and cultures who read them change. This study explores the Nights with reference to this view of literature, for the Nights has a history distinguished by transformation."--Jacket.