From Fiction to History and Back: The Tale, Its Versions and Its Afterlives
From Fiction to History and Back: The Tale, Its Versions and Its Afterlives
This chapter introduces the fictional tale by tracing its evolution from its unknown origins in what was probably the seventeenth century to its historicisation and Christianisation in the nineteenth century, to its infiltration of popular culture and the fine arts in the twentieth century. Its adaptations across various media, including literature, cinema and music, are explored. The chapter furthermore shows how the tale inscribes the endemic paradigms of the ʿUdhrī love narrative and the popular epic or sīra with the western model of the damsel-in-distress fairy tale. Finally, the chapter relates the process by which the tale becomes absorbed into Arabic culture to Yuri Lotman’s notion of the ‘boundary’ as the site of artistic innovation and the creation of new genres.
Keywords: Al-Barrāq, Laylā the Chaste, sīra, ʿUdhrī love, fairy tale, Yuri Lotman, Bāhija Ḥāfiẓ, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Shukrī, Asmahān
British Academy Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.