ABSTRACT
In Background above it was argued that the Thousand and one nights, as a literary work, cannot be considered as a coherent whole, but rather as a generically and structurally diffuse collection. This implies that the work cannot be studied from a single perspective or within the framework of a single totalizing approach. The Thousand and one nights is a text that requires the acceptance of a multiplicity of approaches from different angles, which may or may not interconnect at certain points. Moreover, it seems impossible, considering the multifaceted character of the work, to draw all-encompassing and systematic conclusions with regard to the work as a whole. All conclusions have to be mitigated by reservations concerning the philological status or generic peculiarities of the stories and have to do justice to the complexity of the work’s concept. Stories may be connected by certain themes or motifs, but this does not mean that they have been conceived by a single author or have been developed in the same period. Some stories may originally have been linked to the framing story, while others were only added as part of an associative process of compiling and editing. Conclusions, therefore, can only be based on specific questions about specific stories, or about clusters of stories. The work can be discussed and analyzed, but it cannot be ‘reconstructed’ within the scope of general conclusions.
