{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.027819175360158967, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004967709885742673, 'mean_word_length': 5.333333333333333, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
"The Arabian Nights" in Historical Context: Between East and West (review)

throughout the period. In the course of an informed and well-paced account that details the development of notions of literary property in the long eighteenth century, Stern provides his reader with a sweeping but still scrupulously comprehensive survey of the issues raised in the course of the period’s myriad debates over copyright law—many of which debates, amazingly, yet have the power to resonate today. Manoeuvring his way gracefully through a mass of material that extends from the background provided by the work of John Locke, to the Licensing Acts of the midand late seventeenth century, through to the more explicit debates concerning copyright law that flourished in the first several decades of the century that followed (and Stern nicely emphasizes “the limited scope of legal protection and the correspondingly wide reach of the public domain” [72] at the time), the essay wraps up its historical coverage with a discussion of the “parodic and imitative writing” (88) that was “allowed to flourish” (72) under the legal regime that was in place by (at least) the middle years of the eighteenth century. In his closing pages, Stern reiterates a fundamental question that asks “why modern scholars might find a greater emphasis on aesthetic originality [among the writers active in the literary culture of the eighteenth century] than the contemporaneous legal discussion seems to support” (88). He concludes (as part of his response) with an acknowledgment that “theories of aesthetic originality have been so massively influential since the early nineteenth century that, to modern eyes, any reference to originality seems necessarily to include some element of creativity” (88). The essay possesses the virtue of emphasizing once again for the volume’s readers just how relevant, how timely, and how truly fascinating the seemingly “historical” material and contexts examined throughout this collection actually remain.