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New Arabian Nights
This is the extended annotated edition including a detailed biographical primer on the life and works of the author. Stevenson's title for these tales of imagination clearly shows what he intended their character to be. Plainly they were not meant to be realistic. Their stilted, artificial style is out of keeping with such an object. They were evidently to be stories which are entertaining in the same way that the "Arabian Nights" is entertaining, with just as little pretence of realism. As a child in his grandfather's manse at Colinton he had devoured the eastern tales; the New Arabian Nights, written when he was twenty-eight, are a special form of literary invention which came easily from Stevenson's habit of investing the most ordinary places and people with the wildest romance. The stories are peculiar in that their artificial style leaves one ungripped by the horror of adventure, such as those of The Suicide Club. But the artificiality was clearly deliberate; when he wanted, no one better than Stevenson could write tales of horror to make the flesh creep. He did in fact project a series of this kind, of which only one or two were completed. But in the New Arabian Nights it is easy to see his precise aim at a lighter effect. No doubt the pleasure in the technical problem — at once Stevenson's curse, and the source of his unequalled prose — prompted this experiment.
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New Arabian Nights
This is the extended annotated edition including a detailed biographical primer on the life and works of the author. Stevenson's title for these tales of imagination clearly shows what he intended their character to be. Plainly they were not meant to be realistic. Their stilted, artificial style is out of keeping with such an object. They were evidently to be stories which are entertaining in the same way that the "Arabian Nights" is entertaining, with just as little pretence of realism. As a child in his grandfather's manse at Colinton he had devoured the eastern tales; the New Arabian Nights, written when he was twenty-eight, are a special form of literary invention which came easily from Stevenson's habit of investing the most ordinary places and people with the wildest romance. The stories are peculiar in that their artificial style leaves one ungripped by the horror of adventure, such as those of The Suicide Club. But the artificiality was clearly deliberate; when he wanted, no one better than Stevenson could write tales of horror to make the flesh creep. He did in fact project a series of this kind, of which only one or two were completed. But in the New Arabian Nights it is easy to see his precise aim at a lighter effect. No doubt the pleasure in the technical problem — at once Stevenson's curse, and the source of his unequalled prose — prompted this experiment.
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New Arabian Nights

New Arabian Nights

by Robert Louis Stevenson
New Arabian Nights
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New Arabian Nights

New Arabian Nights

by Robert Louis Stevenson

Overview

This is the extended annotated edition including a detailed biographical primer on the life and works of the author. Stevenson's title for these tales of imagination clearly shows what he intended their character to be. Plainly they were not meant to be realistic. Their stilted, artificial style is out of keeping with such an object. They were evidently to be stories which are entertaining in the same way that the "Arabian Nights" is entertaining, with just as little pretence of realism. As a child in his grandfather's manse at Colinton he had devoured the eastern tales; the New Arabian Nights, written when he was twenty-eight, are a special form of literary invention which came easily from Stevenson's habit of investing the most ordinary places and people with the wildest romance. The stories are peculiar in that their artificial style leaves one ungripped by the horror of adventure, such as those of The Suicide Club. But the artificiality was clearly deliberate; when he wanted, no one better than Stevenson could write tales of horror to make the flesh creep. He did in fact project a series of this kind, of which only one or two were completed. But in the New Arabian Nights it is easy to see his precise aim at a lighter effect. No doubt the pleasure in the technical problem — at once Stevenson's curse, and the source of his unequalled prose — prompted this experiment.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9783849642440
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
Publication date: 01/21/2014
Sold by: Bookwire
Format: eBook
Pages: 249
File size: 426 KB

About the Author

Born in Edinburgh in 1850, to strict Calvinist parents, Robert Louis Stevenson was a famous Scottish novelist, poet and travel writer. His ill health meant that he spent the latter part of his life voyaging the world, in an attempt to find a climate that suited his health, and this contributed to the exoticism of much of his work. He finally settled in Samoa, and died in 1899. Revered during his lifetime, and often harshly underrated since his death, Robert Louis Stevenson is today recognized as one of the the great writers of the nineteenth century, having influenced authors such as Graham Greene, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov.

Date of Birth:

November 13, 1850

Date of Death:

December 3, 1894

Place of Birth:

Edinburgh, Scotland

Place of Death:

Vailima, Samoa

Education:

Edinburgh University, 1875
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