Les Amoureux de Schéhérazade: Variations modernes sur les Mille et Une Nuits (review)

The tales of the One Thousand and One Nights have been a source of fascination and inspiration for Western writers since they were translated by Antoine Galland in the eighteenth century. Dominique Jullien’s new book Les Amoureux de Schéhérazade explores the fertile territory of modern rewritings of the Nights, focusing on the French-language tradition (from Restif de la Bretonne to Assia Djebar), but also situating it within a larger context: Edgar Allan Poe, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Salman Rushdie, A.S. Byatt, Naguib Mahfouz, and John Barth are only a few of the authors mentioned in the course of the discussion. The book maps out a complex and varied intertextual field in which the diverse rewritings harness different potentialities of their model, and reveal the rich interpretative possibilities available to readers of the Nights.