The Thousand and One Nights and World Literature in the Twentieth Century
Date March, 04 2021
Location Live Webinar on Zoom
It is gradually being acknowledged that the Arabic story-collection Thousand and OneNights has had a major influence on European and world literature. In this lecture, we will examine the influence of the Nights, as an intertextual model, on 20th century prose literature from all over the world. Several authors will be discussed whose work has been crucial in the shaping of the main trends in 20th century literature, such as modernism, magical realism and postmodernism. Several themes and narrative strategies will be examined set in their narratological, literary-historical and political contexts. It will be argued that the case of the Thousand and One Nights represents a quintessential example of the mechanisms of intertextuality and the development of what can be called ‘world literature’.
Speakers
Dr Assef Ashraf
Lecturer in Eastern Islamic Lands, Faculty of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, Cambridge University
Richard van Leeuwen
Richard van Leeuwen has published widely on the history of the Middle East, Arabic literature, and Islam, and is also a translator of Arabic literature. His publications include Notables and Clergy in Mount Lebanon (1994); Waqfs and Urban Structures (1999); The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (2004); The Thousand and One Nights: space, travel, and transformation (2007); Narratives of Kingship in Eurasian Empires, 1300-1800 (2007); The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth Century Fiction (2018), for which he won a Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2020. He is a senior lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Amsterdam.