In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from literary criticism of later generations and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter the Arabian Nights through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

The sedate and philosophical turn from [the Arabian Nights] with contempt; the gay and volatile laugh at their seeming absurdities; those of an elegant and correct taste are disgusted with their grotesque figures and fantastic imagery; and however we may be occasionally amused by their wild and diversified incidents, they are seldom thoroughly relished but by children, or by men whose imagination is complimented at the expense of their judgement. . . .

—from Remarks on the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (1797)

Nothing can more strongly prove the general merit of the works which are now offered to the English public, for the first time in a select and uniform edition, than the astonishing popularity which they enjoy over so extensive a portion of the inhabitable parts of the globe. There are few who do not recollect with pleasure the emotions they felt when the Thousand and One Nights were first put into their hands; the anxiety which accompanied the perusal; the interest with which their minds were impressed in the fate of the imaginary heroes and heroines; and the golden dreams of happiness and splendour which the fairy palaces and ex haustless treasures of the east presented to their imagination. It may be safely asserted, that such fictions as the magic lamp of Aladdin, and the cavern of the Forty Thieves, have contributed more to the amusement and delight of every succeeding generation since the fortunate appearance of these tales in this quarter of the world, than all the works which the industry and imagination of Europeans have provided for the instruction and entertainment of youth. Such a storehouse of ingenious fiction and of splendid imagery, of supernatural agency skillfully introduced, conveying morality, not in the austere form of imperative precept and dictatorial aphorism, but in the more pleasing shape of example, is not to be found in any other existing work of the imagination. No doubt the utter defiance of probability in many of these tales, the superabundance of the marvellous in their composition, and the undeniable silliness of some of them, may be justly censured; but all such frigid reasoning can never deter youthful minds from being pleased with what is so well calculated for their amusement, nor the more experienced from recurring now and then to that which brings back to their memory, in a lively manner, the visionary happiness of their earlier years. Many of the most enlightened and learned men have not disdained occasionally to relieve their severer studies by the enjoyment of these relaxations, and to banish for a time the more laborious and painful investigations of reality, by revisiting these regions of fancy, and again revelling in all its extravagant sports. Some of the brightest luminaries of literature have not thought it beneath their dignity to imitate these fables and reveries of eastern imagination; and while the names of Addison and Johnson, of Rousseau and Voltaire, may be adduced as imitators of their style, the admirers of oriental novelists do not stand in need of apology for having a predilection for their productions.

—from his introduction to Tales of the East (1812)

To us, the Arabian Nights [is] one of the most beautiful books in the world: not because there is nothing but pleasure in it, but because the pain has infinite chances of vicissitude, and because the pleasure is within the reach of all who have body and soul, and imagination. The poor man there sleeps in a door-way with his love, and is richer than a king. The Sultan is dethroned tomorrow, and has a finer throne the next day. The pauper touches a ring, and spirits wait upon him. You ride in the air; you are rich in solitude; you long for somebody to return your love, and an Eden encloses you in its arms. You have this world, and you have another. Fairies are in your moon-light. Hope and imagination have their fair play, as well as the rest of us. There is action heroical, and passion too: people can suffer, as well as enjoy, for love; you have bravery, luxury, fortitude, self-devotion, comedy as good as Moliere’s, tragedy, Eastern manners, the wonderful that is in a commonplace, and the verisimilitude that is in the wonderful calendars, cadis, robbers, enchanted palaces, paintings full of color and drapery, warmth for the senses, desert in arms and exercises to keep it manly, cautions to the rich, humanity for the more happy, and hope for the miserable.

—from Leigh Hunt’s London Journal (1834)

It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius, in the world, was no man’s work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. . . . Vedas, Æsop’s Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men. In the composition of such works, the time thinks, the market thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer, the fop, all think for us.

—from Representative Men (1850)

There is one book, for example, more generally loved than Shakespeare, that captivates in childhood, and still delights in age—I mean the ‘Ara bian Nights’—where you shall look in vain for moral or for intellectual interest. No human face or voice greets us among that wooden crowd of kings and genies, sorcerers and beggarmen. Adventure, on the most naked terms, furnishes forth the entertainment and is found enough.

—from Longman’s Magazine (November 1882)

Here again, therefore, we come near to one of the essential ideas which give their perennial charm to the Arabian Nights. It is the idea that idleness it not an empty thing. Idleness can be, and should be a particularly full thing, rich as it is in the Arabian Nights with invaluable jewels and incalculable stories. Idleness, or leisure, as the Eastern chronicler would probably prefer to call it, is indeed our opportunity of seeing the vision of all things, our rural audience for hearing, as the Sultan of the Indies heard them, the stories of all created things. In that hour, if we know how to use it, the tree tells its story to us, the stone in the road recites its memoirs, the lamppost and the paling expatiate on their autobiographies. For as the most hideous nightmare in the world is an empty leisure, so the most enduring pleasure is a full leisure. We can defend ourselves, even on the Day of Judgment, if our work has been useless, with pleas of opportunity, competition and fulness of days.

—from the Daily News (November 7, 1901)

In The Arabian Nights we have a series of stories, some of them very good ones, in which no sort of decorum is observed. The result is that they are infinitely more instructive and enjoyable than our romances, because love is treated in them as naturally as any other passion. There is no cast iron convention as to its effects; no false association of general depravity of character with its corporealities or of general elevation with its sentimentalities; no pretence that a man or woman cannot be courageous and kind and friendly unless infatuatedly in love with somebody (is no poet manly enough to sing The Old Maids of England?): rather, indeed, an insistence on the blinding and narrowing power of lovesickness to make princely heroes unhappy and unfortunate. These tales expose, further, the delusion that the interest of this most capricious, most transient, most easily baffled of all instincts, is inexhaustible, and that the field of the English romancer has been cruelly narrowed by the restrictions under which he is permitted to deal with it. The Arabian storyteller, relieved of all such restrictions, heaps character on character, adventure on adventure, marvel on marvel; whilst the English novelist, like the starving tramp who can think of nothing but his hunger, seems unable to escape from the obsession of sex, and will rewrite the very gospels because the originals are not written in the sensuously ecstatic style.

—from the preface to Three Plays for Puritans (1901)

Scheherazade avoided her fate because she knew how to wield the weapon of suspense—the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages. Great novelist though she was,—exquisite in her descriptions, tolerant in her judgments, ingenious in her incidents, advanced in her morality, vivid in her delineations of character, expert in her knowledge of three Oriental capitals—it was yet on none of these gifts that she relied when trying to save her life from her intolerable husband. They were but incidental. She only survived because she managed to keep the king wondering what would happen next.

—from Aspects of the Novel (1927)