A collection of essays which attempts to chart the influence of Arabian stories on English literature since Chaucer's day. In the tales of Scheherezade, the contributors claim, lie some of the origins of genres such as the novel and detective and science fiction. The authors covered in these studies include Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Austen, De Quincey, Dickens, Thackeray, Gaskell, the Brontes, Wilkie Collins, Le Fanu, Stevenson, Meredith, Darwin, Keats, Huxley, Henry James, Chesterton, Wells, Conrad, Joyce, W.B.Yeats, Kipling, Freud, the Woolfs, Herbert Read and many others.