The Poetics of Transposition and Transformation: a Study of the Marvelous Foundations in Salah Al-Din Boujah’s Novel Seven Maidens

Abstract: Salah al-Din Boujah’s novelistic practice displays a distinctive signature that emerges at linguistic, technical, aesthetic, and semantic levels. This paper focuses on a central dimension of that singular creative project through Seven Maidens, a novel that draws on popular heritage to construct narrative worlds shaped by the marvelous and the fantastic. Boujah’s return to folkloric materials is not a purely archival gesture. It functions as a way to stage correspondences between past and present, while mobilizing heritage-based components to speak to contemporary concerns. Keywords: narration, popular heritage, folktale, the marvelous, cultural rooting.