List of works influenced by One Thousand and One Nights
The Middle Eastern story collection One Thousand and One Nights has had a profound impact on culture around the world. Literature The influence of the versions of The Nights on world literature is immense. Writers as diverse as Henry Fielding and Naguib Mahfouz have alluded to the work by name in their own literature. Other writers who have been influenced by the Nights include John Barth, Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie, Goethe, Walter Scott, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Nodier, Flaubert, Marcel Schwob, Stendhal, Dumas, Gérard de Nerval, Gobineau, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Hofmannsthal, Conan Doyle, W. B. Yeats, H. G. Wells, Cavafy, Calvino, Georges Perec, H. P. Lovecraft, Marcel Proust, A. S. Byatt, Ruydard Kipling and Angela Carter. This work has been influential in the West since it was translated in the 18th century, first by Antoine Galland. Many imitations were written, especially in France. Various characters from this epic have themselves become cultural icons in Western culture, such as Aladdin, Sinbad and Ali Baba. Part of its popularity may have sprung from the increasing historical and geographical knowledge, so that places of which little was known and so marvels were plausible had to be set further "long ago" or farther "far away"; this is a process that continues, and finally culminate in the fantasy world having little connection, if any, to actual times and places. Several elements from Arabian mythology and Persian mythology are now common in modern fantasy, such as genies, magic carpets, magic lamps, etc. When L. Frank Baum proposed writing a modern fairy tale that banished stereotypical elements, he included the genie as well as the dwarf and the fairy as stereotypes to go. 18th century Candide, ou l'optimisme (Candide, or Optimism; 1758) by Voltaire, contains a number of references to the story of Sindbâd the Seaman, notably the underground river in Eldorado, where in Candide the heroes are picked up by a machine. In his introduction to Zadig Voltaire wrote: The story was first written in Chaldean, which neither you nor I understand. Later it was translated into Arabic to amuse the famous Sultan Ouloug Beg, at the same time that the Arabs and Persians were beginning to write the Thousand-and-one-Nights, the Thousand-and-one-Days etc. Ouloug Beg preferred Zadig, but the Sultanas liked the Thousand-and-One more. 'How is it possible,' said the wise Ouloug, 'that you prefer tales which have neither sense nor reason?' 'That is just why we like them so much, 'replied the Sultanas. Further references to the Arabian Nights are expressed in parallels with the stories of Khudâdâd and His Brothers, 'Alâ' al-Dîn, and the History of the Princess of Daryâbâr. Whereas the Arabian Nights focuses on the narrative themes of providence and destiny, Voltaire substituted the interference of divine power with human intervention. Nourjahad (1767), moral tale by Frances Sheridan. Vathek (1786) by William Beckford. Oriental fantasy which strongly influenced the Gothic novel. One Thousand and One Nights influenced The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, by Jan Potocki. A Polish noble