Ḥannā Diyāb and His Tales - (Handbook of Oriental Studies: Section 1; The Near and Middle East) (Hardcover)

About the Book

Ḥannā Diyāb and His Tales is a handbook of previously published and new research on the early eighteenth-century Syrian storyteller Ḥannā Diyāb, the influential narrator of some of the best-known tales associated with The Thousand and One Nights.

Book Synopsis

Ḥannā Diyāb and His Tales focuses on Ḥannā Diyāb, a Christian storyteller from Aleppo who originally narrated some of the world's most famous stories, among them "Aladdin" and "Ali Baba." In the late spring of 1709, he told these tales in Paris to the scholar Antoine Galland, who published them in the concluding volumes of his French version of The Thousand and One Nights. Long entirely unknown, Diyāb's role went underacknowledged in scholarship on the Nights until recently.

As a handbook, this volume brings some of the most important published scholarship on Diyāb together with new research, examining the sources of his tales and their reception, his interactions with Galland and Paul Lucas, and his literary environment in early eighteenth-century Aleppo.

About the Author

James Weaver, Ph.D. (2013), is a researcher in the History Department at the University of Zurich. He studies the pre-modern Arabic textual tradition and has written on heresiographies and the usefulness of the term "encyclopedia" in relation to Arabic literature.

Ulrich Marzolph, Dr. Phil. (1981), is a retired adjunct professor of Islamic Studies at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen, Germany. His field of expertise is the narrative culture of the Muslim world with particular emphasis on Persian and Arabic popular literature.