Thesis title: Otherness and the Other Sex Within the Frame Story of The Thousand and One Nights: Texts and Criticism
The Arabian Nights is the most famous Medieval Arabic collection of tales that brings together stories from different literary traditions, mainly Indian and Persian. It is a masterpiece of world literature, and there is an extensive body of scholarly work on it. Following its “rediscovery” by the French orientalist A. Galland in the 1700s and the publication of the printed Arabic editions in the 1800s, the collection became subject to prolific criticism. The best-known narrative of the Arabian Nights is the frame story of the collection, and since the late 1970s, a new line of critical scholarship has emerged, providing multiple interpretations of this element of the text. Perhaps inspired by the rewritings of the frame story in modern and contemporary fiction, this new criticism has proposed topical readings which have been inspired by feminist and gender approaches (Grossman, 1980; Malti-Douglas, 1991; Sallis, 1990), psychoanalytic theories (Beaumont, 2002; Clinton, 1985), and sociocultural and postcolonial perspectives (Mernissi, 2001; Shamma 2017). The main subject of these readings falls within the realm of otherness, and specifically of “sexual and gendered otherness”, i.e., the representation of the other and the relationship with the other sex. This research project identifies in the question of otherness the starting point from which to undertake the scrutiny of the academic literature on the frame story and offer a documented and critical overview of the main trends in modern and contemporary scholarship. In order to achieve this goal, this study proposes an innovative methodology which first compares the various versions and translations of the opening narrative of the Arabian Nights, and then investigates the critical readings, comparing them with the version(s) and/or translation(s) of the frame story they have taken into consideration. This preliminary phase of research sees its continuation in a more substantial discussion about how the readings have presented the question of the relationship with the other sex in the opening narrative of the AN. This study is also the first attempt to offer an annotated outline of the modern and contemporary criticism of the frame story concentrating on both English (i.e., written in English) and Arabic (i.e., written in Arabic) scholarship.