Motivated fictionality: Worldbuilding and The Thousand and One Nights

Abstract Inundated with visions of domed desert kingdoms, tyrant kings, flying carpets, and shapeshifting jinn, the visual vocabulary that has come to be associated The Thousand One Nights can traced back earliest illustrated translations stories, one first which was British orientalist Edward Lane’s three volume edition published between 1839–41. Interspersed 635 woodcut prints designed for by illustrator William Harvey, this version developed an identity rooted in ethnographically realist art annotation. Since much own travel research folded into through choice commentary renderings, key illustrations are closely read here as having channeled translator’s scholarly motivations world stories. Embraced not just a work storytelling, but also worldbuilding, positioned essay ripe receptive interventions where writing visualizing fiction is indivisible from construction perception reality.