The Sleep of the Sultan. Rewriting of the Mille et une nuits in eighteenth-century contes exotiques
Abstract
This paper analyses the influence of Galland's Les Mille et une nuits on two Eighteenth Century French tales: Crébillon's Le Sopha and Diderot's L'Oiseau blanc, conte bleu. The focus is the use of Galland's narrative structure by French conte philosophique. Particularly, Crébillon's and Diderot's tales inherit from Galland's work the topic of the "asleep sultan". If in Les Mille et une nuits the narrative voice has the function to keep the listener awake, Crébillon and Diderot overturn the link between speaker and listener, as their narrative voices induce on the contrary sleep on the listener. This overturning is considered here as a consequence of these writers' theory of literature and philosophy.
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