topics: |  literature

vignettes and enticing sketches of significant authors,
all described with a touch of humour,
genres and styles and literary movements.

Indian / Arabic fables to Dante Chaucer and Shakespeare

from "AD200-1400: Asian Exports", p.18--

Scribblers weren't over-concerned to invent original stories.  Like
jewellers, they were expected to cut, polish and set materials brought in
from somewhere else.  That somewhere else, for European writers, was very
frequently Asia - above all the great story-factory of India.  Shakespeare,
Chaucer and Dante all draw on narrative ideas that can be ultimately traced
back, through complex transmissions, to the oral art of Indian
village-square entertainers - much of it recorded in the great 21nd-century
collection called the Panchatantra.  The most familiar Western image of
this Asian art is Scheherezade, spinning her yarns to keep the axe from her
neck for 1001 Arabian Nights.  But Sinbad, Aladdin, Ali Baba, and the rest
probably started life in the subcontinent, or possibly Iran, rather than
Haroun al-Rashid's Baghdad.  The collection gradually travelled west,
translation by translation, finally hitting Europe in the 18th c.

1928: Radclyffe Hall's novel of lesbian love, The Well of Loneliness, is
condemned in GB and US ...