The Book of a Thousand and One Nights, better known as The Arabian Nights, is a classic of world literature and the most universally known work of Arabic narrative. In this groundbreaking study, Professor Ghazoul applies modern critical methodology to an exploration of this intricate and much-admired literary masterpiece.

She draws on a wealth of critical tools - medieval Arabic aesthetics and poetics, mythology and folklore, allegory and comedy, postmodern literary criticism, and formal structural analysis - to explain the specific analysis of the The Arabian Nights. She describes and examines the internal cohesion of the book, establishing its morphology and revealing the dialectics of the frame story and enframed cycles of narrative.

She discusses various forms of narrative - folk epics, animal fables, Sindbad voyages, and demon stories - and analyzes them in relation to narrative works from India, Europe, and the Americas.

Covering an impressive range of writings, from the ancient Indian classic The Panchatantra to the works of Shakespeare and the modern writers Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth, and Naguib Mahfouz, Professor Ghazoul places The Arabian Nights in the context of an ongoing storytelling tradition and illustrates its influence on world literature.