The interliterary reception of the Arabian Nights in O. Henry’s selected short stories

This paper critically examines the presence of the Arabian Nights in the short stories of the American writer O. Henry (1862–1910). Departing significantly from previous studies on this topic, this study challenges the traditional model of influence studies that has long dominated comparative literary scholarship. Such an approach, often restrictive, yields limited critical insight. Instead, this study adopts a reception-oriented framework to analyze the presence of the Arabian Nights in O. Henry’s selected short stories. This theoretical perspective offers a more nuanced understanding of how the host text interacts with the source text on a textual level. The analysis is guided by Dionýz Durišin's model of interliterary reception, which provides a more effective framework for assessing O. Henry’s creative engagement with the Arabian Nights. Additionally, the paper focuses on a specific subset of O. Henry’s short stories those that explicitly reference the Arabian Nights in their titles and structure their narratives around its master plots. The very act of interliterary reception that underlies the construction of the five 'Arabian Nights' short stories provides invaluable insights into the ways in which America of the late nineteenth century imagines itself critically in the mirror of the Arabian Nights.