Anonymous, One Thousand and One Nights

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The Arabian Nights

, known in Arabic as

Alf laylah wa laylah

or

The Thousand and One Nights

, is an anonymous collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian narratives compiled during the Islamic Golden Age (8th-15th centuries CE). Containing hundreds of fables, heroic epics, historical tales, love stories, tragedies, burlesques, debates, fairy tales, political allegories, poems, adventure fantasies, erotic and pornographic stories, murder mysteries, suspense thrillers with multiple plot twists, scatological jokes, mystical anecdotes, chronicles of low life, rhetorical debates, and comedies, the work is a veritable literary labyrinth consisting of numerous layers of stories within stories.

Although the Arabian Nights has had an immense influence on the literature and culture of the Western

3004 words

Citation: Morrow, John Andrew. "One Thousand and One Nights". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 March 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=23514, accessed 19 March 2024.]

23514 One Thousand and One Nights 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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