Acknowledgments
The number of colleagues and friends who have helped me trace the material for this research over the years is, I’m afraid, too vast to mention individually. Special thanks go to Aboubakr Chraïbi, who has played a crucial role in revitalizing Thousand and one nights studies in the past decade, and Dominique Jullien, Wen-chin Ouyang, Antonella Ghersetti, and Frédéric Bauden, and others who invited me to conferences in which I could present preliminary findings of my research and discuss them with colleagues. Some parts of chapters have already appeared in previous publications in earlier versions, especially conference proceedings.1 I would like to thank my partner Djûke Poppinga and our daughter Nynke for providing a stable environment for my research. I apologize to them for the recurrent avalanches of books which inevitably haunted our living space as the research proceeded. Special thanks are due to Valerie Turner, who patiently and meticulously corrected and edited the text. Needless to say, any shortcomings in the present book are not attributable to the colleagues mentioned above, but are strictly my own.
I.e., the analyses of Hofmannsthal’s ‘Märchen’ (chapter 1, “The Thousand and one nights and European modernism: Hugo von Hofmannsthal,” in A. Chraïbi and C. Ramirez (eds.), Les Mille et une nuits et le récit Oriental en Espagne et l’Occident (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009), 175–188; Salih’s Season of migration to the north (chapter 1), and al-Faqih’s Gardens of the night (chapter 1, “The forbidden room: The Thousand and one nights and Ibrahim Faqih’s Gardens of the night,” in S. Boustani, I. Camera d’Afflitto, R. El-Enany, W. Granara (eds.), Desire, pleasure and the taboo: New voices and freedom of expression in contemporary Arabic literature, Supplemento no. 1, Rivista degli studi orientali, new series, vol. 87 (Pisa and Rome: Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2014), 45–62.