Adapting Shahrazad's Odyssey ─ The Female Wanderer and Storyteller in Victorian and Contemporary Middle Eastern Literature

Adapting Shahrazad’s Odyssey: The Female Wanderer and Storyteller in Victorian and Contemporary Middle Eastern Literature focuses on a comparative study of the figure of the female traveler and storyteller in nineteenth-century Victorian literature and contemporary Anglophone Middle Eastern writing. Eda Dedebas Dundar’s cutting-edge study is the first to discover a strong link between traveling texts and the traveling women in fiction, analyzing the ways in which she is molded by her previous exposure to stories. This unique and interdisciplinary book explores the relationship between traveling and writing through the incorporation of various disciplines, including gender studies and postcolonial studies.
Through close analysis, the author illuminates three main concepts: travel as a metaphor for rewriting, the female wanderer as the reworked adaptation of Odysseus and Shahrazad, and the notion of adaptation as a metatextual travel between Victorian and contemporary, nostalgia and progress. Scholars whose areas of expertise include nineteenth- and twentieth-century global Anglophone literature as well as travel writing and gender studies will find this text of particular interest. Moreover, this book further highlights fields of study in the humanities, including literature, gender studies, and civil liberties, aimed at an academic audience interested in travel narratives, women’s writing, postcolonial literature, women’s studies, and human rights. This text will be of special interest in courses such as Victorian women’s writing, Victorian children’s literature, global Anglophone literatures, women writers from the Middle East, and literary adaptation and appropriation.

Eda Dedebas Dundar is a visiting scholar at University of Washington, Seattle and a former postdoctoral fellow at University of Nevada, Reno. She received her PhD in comparative literature from the University of Connecticut. She holds a BA and an MA in English from Bogazici University. Her research interests include Victorian literature, women writers from the Middle East, contemporary Anglophone literature, and travel writing. Her publications have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal and Journal of Commonwealth and Post-colonial Studies.