Download or read book The Thousand and One Nights written by M. S. Mahdi and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1995 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Almost three centuries have passed since the oldest manuscript of "The Thousand and One Nights" arrived in Europe. Since then, the "Nights" have occupied the minds of scholars world-wide, in particular the questions of origin, composition, language and literary form. In this book, Muhsin Mahdi, whose critical edition of the text brought so much praise, explores the complex literary history of the "Nights," bringing to fruition the search for the archetype that constituted the core of the surviving editions, and treating the fascinating story of the growth of the collection of stories that we now know as "The Thousand and One Nights,"