● The Arabian Nights- or to give its real name Alf Layla wa-Layla, which literally

translates into English as One Thousand Nights and a Night – is one of the classic
works of all fantastic literature.
● The time when it was composed is unknown- sometimes around the 9th -10th
centuries, with the stories originating out of the Persian oral tradition.
●Many of the tales were added later and their actual number varies widely from
version to version.
●The collection first appeared in Europe with Frenchman Antoine Galland’s twelve
volume translation Les Mile et une Nuits (One Thousand and One Nights) (1704-
17).
●Galland’s translation is controversial as many of the stories in it- including those
to Alladin and Ali Baba. Which have become the most famous in the collection with
the general public- are not found in any other existing Arabic manuscripts.
●Galland’s is generally believed to have created these stories to himself or else
adapted them from now lost manuscripts.
●There have been a number of other translations since then, many adding and
removing various tales. With the most famous of these being explorer Richard
Burton’s The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night (1885), which proved
controversial due to Burton’s retaining of the original’s adult content.
 Characters:
King Shahryar
- The King of kings of Persian Sassanid who is told stories by his wife ,
Scheherazade.
- In the frame story, Shahryar is betrayed by his wife make him believe
that all women evil. So every night years, he takes a wife and
has executed the next morning

Scheherazade
- The storyteller and narrates of the night. She is the daughter
of the Kingdom’s vizier and sister of Dunyazad
 Dunyazad
- is the younger sister of Queen Scheherazade.
- In the story cycle, she is the one who initiates the tactic of
cliffhanger storytelling to prevent her sister’s execution by
King Shahryar

Scheherazade Father
- sometimes called Jafar, every day, on the king’s order, he
beheads the brides of Shahryar . He does this for many years
until all the unmarried women in the kingdom have either
been killed or run away, at which point Scheherazade offers
to marry the king.
 Settings:
 India and Indochina
 Samarkand

THEME:
 Magic and fantasy
 A rise from poverty to riches and a fall back
down again
PLOT:
Exposition

• There were once to kings

who ruled wonderfully. They
were loved by everyone and
they both had a beautiful
wife.
Rising Action
Climax
 Moral lesson of the Story:

 Not all wives are murderous and evil, and “ if you LOVE
somebody enough, you can forgive them anything”.

 Even if one has a power, it isn’t that important. What is

important is HAPPINESS.