Les Amoureux De Scheherazade: Variations Modernes Sur Les Mille Et Une Nuits

The Thousand and One Nights, with the Bible and the Odyssey, has had a profound impact on literature, and writers in love with Scheherazade have sought to reinvent the Nights - without imitating them. This profusion can be channeled into four main streams, which provide the four chapters of this book. First, the political reading of the Nights: the first chapter focuses on a staple figure of the 19th century popular novel, the princely hero who, like Haroun Al-Rashid, dresses up as a man of the people in order to right wrongs. Next, the aesthetic reading: the second chapter explores the reception of Joseph-Charles Mardrus's new translation in the literary and cultural world of the 1900s. The third chapter on feminist readings shows how Mardrus's version played a key role in the feminist readings of the frame story which blossom beginning in the 1920s, and culminate with Algerian novelist Assia Djebar's pessimistic rewriting of the Nights in the context of rising Islamic extremism. And last, introspective readings: by analyzing the case of Michel Butor's autobiography, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ape, which rewrites Galland's "Tale of the Second Calender", the fourth chapter, "Introspective Adventures", looks at an interpretative tradition that reads the tales as a spiritual adventure and an image of the creative process. From Restif de la Bretonne to Michel Butor, here, then, is the story of the French rewriting of the Arabian Nights. French text.