Les romans paléologues et les contes arabes

Abstract

The Palaiologan romances, inspired by courtly romances, align their Western models with the Byzantine literary tradition and draw from more popular patterns, such as a narrative punctuated by meta-enunciative locutions, also employing magical items and ancestral fabulous motifs, such as the flying horse (derived from the tales of One Thousand and One Nights) or the jewel swallowed by a hawk and discovered in a fish's stomach, a motif employed in the Qamar az-Zaman tale of One Thousand and One Nights.