What You’ll Love about… The Thousand and One Nights
I first encountered The Thousand and One Nights, which is also referred to as The Arabian Nights, as I was preparing to teach it to my World Literature students. It blew me away. I was angry that nobody had recommended it to me or assigned it as reading in a class. It has a mixed reputation. There are lewd passages. Some of the stories reflect common human failings. Some of the stories can denigrate groups of people and reinforce stereotypes. On the whole, however, it teaches invaluable lessons about virtue, sacrifice, leadership, justice, compassion, trust, and tolerance. It’s one of my favorite things to read, and I never get tired of teaching it.
The Arabian Nights is a frame narrative. Frame narratives use one story to serve as the context for the telling of other stories. In this case, the story of Shahrazad and Shahrayar is the frame story, because it provides the occasion for the telling of other stories. Frame narratives were popular throughout the world in the middle ages. Other well-known frame narratives are The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, and The Heptameron.
It also relies heavily on embedding. Embedding happens when a story is told within another story. For example, the three old men’s stories are embedded within “The Story of the Merchant and the Demon.”
