Emilie May Meyer
Selected Projects



Instruments of Desire: Chamber Music & Film Program
Hamlet Hail to the Thief
Cabinet Magazine
Archiving, Collecting, Bookselling
Everything Studio
Playlists and Compilations
Dead End Books
Illustrated Arabian Nights
Black Mountain College: Chance Mechanisms 
The Island of Ingmar Bergman
The New York Public Library Picture Collection
Department of Art History Research Journal


Information



The Illustrated Arabian Nights

Research Fellowship

Dean's Research Award

My work investigates the influence of medieval Crusader iconography on illustrated editions of the Arabian Nights published in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Editions from this period are widely recognized as literary palimpsests, encoded through textual erasures and insertions with the imperial and epistemological projects of their translators. Yet despite illustrators performing a comparable act of intersemiotic translation – converting language into a nonverbal system of symbols – the illustrations accompanying the Arabian Nights have long evaded similar scrutiny. I therefore extend existing critiques of interlingual translation in these editions to the visual language that accompanies them. Central to my argument is the claim that illustrators frequently recycled themes from Crusader manuscripts and icons, which offered them readily available, local source material. By re-inscribing Crusader themes in illustrated Arabian Nights circulated widely through Victorian Europe, I suggest that the immediacy of these images operated in a different register than the translators' linguistic strategies in reviving asymmetrical power relations with the Middle East.


Saracens frightening the French knights’ horses. Grandes Chroniques de France. Paris, 1370s. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.



The Arabian Nights Entertainments, London, 1899, Illustrated by A.E Norbury, The Arcadian Library. 
The “Slave of the Ring”, Galland Edition, Paris 1839, Anonymous.
Paul Gavarni’s illustration of the tale of Qamar al Zaman and the Princess Badur from a translation of Galland published in 1864.
Arthur Rackham Fairy Book, London , 1933, The Arcadian Library.


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