Diana Abu-Jaber's 2003 novel, Crescent, examines the complex position of Arabs and Arab Americans living in the United States with respect to notions of identity by creating a complex hybrid text. Crescent offers characters who face different forms of exile and have to work through fractured, destabilized identities to create for themselves new identities that account for and embrace their hyphenated, hybrid positions. The novel does so using a narrative that creatively combines what initially looks like a rather conventional version of the Western born novel form with a storytelling form deriving from the infamous The Thousand and One Nights, often referred to as the Arabian Nights and historically associated with the East.

Arabian Nights in America: Hybrid Form and Identity in Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent

The creative work, Black-Winged Angels, is a collection of nine re-written fairytales. The collection is divided into three sections: Maiden, Mother, Crone and the three stories in each section explore various aspects of these traditional periods in a woman's life. The tales are re-written, or 're-loaded', to offer alternative views of the tales of childhood, to examine other forces that may be at work inside the stories themselves, and the possible consequences of 'living' those tales differently.



The exegesis examines the colonisation and reclamation of a range of fairy tales. It traces the historical shift from oral to literary fairy tale traditions, and the ensuing patriarchal rewriting of those fairytales. The exegesis then considers the writing of Angela Carter and Emma Donoghue (specifically The Bloody Chamber and Kissing the Witch, respectively), in terms of how their work in the fairytale genre has both succeeded in, and failed to, avoid a simple inversion of gender with their revisions of the colonised literary fairytales. 



The exegetical work has grown, in large part, out of the process of critical reflexivity to which I have subjected my creative work. I chose Angela Carter's and Emma Donoghue's works of revisionist fairytales to act as 'bookends' for my own work; Carter as a starting point for fairytale reclamation and Donoghue as a more recent incarnation of the fairytale revisionist. In reflecting on my own work, I often looked back at what these two authors had done, to guide me in the eternal writers' struggle of what to leave in, what to leave out, and where to take the tale.

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Black-winged angels : theoretical underpinnings

Home and the Unheimlich in the Arabian Nights: Shahrazad's Curative Themes Linking the Story-cycles to the Frame-Story

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Suzanne Enderwitz

Papers

Shahrazâd is One of Us: Practical Narrative, Theoretical Discussion, and Feminist Discourse