Of all the late nineteenth-century artists who were deeply affected by The Arabian Nights, D. G. Rossetti, William Morris and Algernon Swinburne appear to be the most eligible representatives of what Said terms ‘latent Orientalism’, a profoundly conservative manifestation of the Orient dedicated to its selfpreservation. Though showing manifest differences in their formal and Personal representations of the Orient, Rossetti, Morris and Swinburne keep intact the separateness of the Orient, its mystic aura, its criminal underworld and its feminine sensuality, or to put it into Arabic terms, its aja’ib (marvels), mutalibun (treasure-hunting) and hur al-ay (femmes fatales), as isolated from the mainstream European progress in the sciences, arts and commerce.

Unlike William Holman Hunt, the Pre-Raphaelite artist who visited the Middle East and promised himself ‘to return in spirit to the Land of good Haroun Alrachid’, Rossetti, Morris and Swinburne did not experience directly the world of the Middle East but, nevertheless, they shared Hunt's fascination with the ‘unsophisticated and simple grace’ of the Orient. As George P. Landow maintains, ‘Exotic places [were] a logical extension of Pre-Raphaelitism’ because by promoting a primitive and archaic form of art, the Pre-Raphaelites identified themselves with the kind of mystical primitivism embodied by the Middle East.

From the pages of Edward William Lane's and Richard F. Burton's translations of Alf Layla wa-Layla, literally ‘One Thousand Nights and a Night’, Rossetti, Morris and Swinburne operate the material appropriation of Oriental tropes, creating their own personal Oriental mythologies in the Nervallian imaginative sense of the word, that is to say: ‘to consume the Orient, to appropriate it, to represent and speak for it, not in history but beyond history, in the timeless dimension of a completely healed world, where men and lands, God and men, are as one’. Far from a scientific and impersonal vision of the East, Rossetti, Morris and Swinburne elaborate their own Oriental aesthetics by projecting such conceptual metaphors as ‘East is crime’ and ‘East is magic’.

To them the East as envisioned in The Arabian Nights is a blended space, a ‘labyrinth of labyrinths’, a maze of marvels and tortures, of archetypal and individual figures, of sorcerers and virtuous sages.