Arabian Nights (from Antoine Galland's French translation))

Some sources from Jill:

 http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.gsu.edu/stable/pdfplus/541287.pdf - Otherness and Otherworldliness: Edward W. Lane's Ethnographic Treatment of The Arabian Nights   -Author(s): Jennifer Schacker-Mill

http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.gsu.edu/stable/pdfplus/461348.pdf - The Rape of Gulliver: Case Study of a Source

-Author(s): Sheila Shaw

http://books.google.com/books?id=DDwXAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false 

James Beattie - On Fable and Romance

http://books.google.com/books?id=ClkcBNyIfcIC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false - The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century

 

Interest in the oriental tale:

Developing interest in alterity as the eighteenth century unfolded is evident also in Oliver Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, which you can have a taste of here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=A_0kAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA182-IA2&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false
This is the Norton introduction to Citizen of the World:

Imagining the Other

Oliver Goldsmith, from The Citizen of the World (1760–1761)

The Chinese philosopher named Lien Chi Altangi, "a native of Honan in China" (Letter I), is the invention of Oliver Goldsmith (c. 1730–1774). Lien Chi Altangi is a scholar who has learned English through his contact with the factor and other Englishmen at Canton, yet he is "entirely a stranger to their manners and customs" (Letter I). Altangi's letters from London to his friend Fum Hoam, the president of the Ceremonial Academy at Peking, "examine into opulence, buildings, sciences, arts, and manufactures, on the spot" (Letter II), and in so doing, expose both England's most ridiculous customs and its defining characteristics. For example, of the British reliance on sea-trade, Altangi exclaims: "I have known some provinces [in China] where there is not even a name for the ocean. What a strange people therefore am I got amongst, who have founded an empire on this unstable element, who build cities upon billows that rise higher than the mountains of Tipartala, and make the deep more formidable than the wildest tempest" (Letter II).

This device — using a foreign traveller as the naive narrator of a contemporary social satire — had been popularized by many writers, most notably Charles.Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, in his Persian Letters (1721). As a reviewer of Elizabeth Hamilton's novel, Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), observed:

There is no better vehicle for local satire than that of presenting remarks on the manners, laws, and customs of a nation, through the supposed medium of a foreigner, whose different views of things, as tinctured by the particular ideas and associations to which his mind has been habituated, often afford an excellent scope for raillery; and the mistakes into which such an observer is naturally betrayed, enliven the picture, and furnish the happiest opportunity for the display of humour and fancy. [The Critical Review, vol. 17 (July 1796): 241–249]

In addition to these literary precedents, Goldsmith had journeyed through much of Europe as a young man, and was familiar with the sense of cultural parallax or changed perspective that travel could induce in the traveller. He exploited this discovery in The Citizen of the World, and in his later fictionalization of his own travels, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766).

Although Goldsmith emphasizes Lien Chi Altangi's differences from that "strange people," the English, Goldsmith also wants to establish his narrator's authority to conduct an enquiry into English manners. He therefore constructs an idea of Chinese identity that stresses China's status as a civilized or "tutored" nation:

The truth is, the Chinese and we are pretty much alike. Different degrees of refinement, and not of distance, mark the distinctions among mankind. Savages of the most opposite climates have all but one character of improvidence and rapacity; and tutored nations, however separate, make use of the very same methods to procure refined enjoyment. ("The Editor's Preface," iii–iv)

Altangi is given further credibility and depth as a character through the creation of a frame story concerning his family in China. The frame story adds dramatic unity and tension to the letters, much like the frame of another popular "oriental" narrative, the Arabian Nights' Entertainments (first translated into English c. 1706–1721 by an anonymous Grub Street hack).

Originally printed in a periodical called The Public Ledger (1760–1761), Goldsmith's "Chinese Letters" were first collected and published as The Citizen of the World in 1762.
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/18century/topic_4/goldsmith.htm

Questions from Jill:

1. Do you think the public readership at the time would have regarded Galland's Nights as a portrayal of embellished luxury in the Orient or an actual depiction of the people and customs of the Far East?

2. How do you think the various translations of the Nights texts throughout the years altered the original meaning of the tales and what impact did the particular audiences have on this influence to each translation?

3. How do Galland's comments about the moral nature of the texts at the beginning of his translation shape the scenes and stories he chose to include in his version?