Sani’ Ol-Molk’s the Thousand and One Nights: A Study of Image Content and Visual Adaptation

This book examines The Thousand and One Nights by Abol-Hassan Khan Sani’ ol-Molk Ghaffari (1813/1814-1867), of the content of the illustrations of the main story, the story of Shahrzad and Shahrbaz, as well as a codicological study of the manuscript. It intends to explain how Sani’ ol-Molk complicates the visual frame by adaptive strategies that build on the relationship between presented objects inside an illustration and the meanings that could be conventionally attributed to them from outside of the image. Examining the illustrations of the manuscript shows how Sani’ ol-Molk’s visualization of the main story of The Thousand and One Nights adds to the narrative and adapts it to convey meaning(s) that transcend the story the illustrations refer to.

Elham Etemadi completed her Ph.D. in Art History at the University of Leuven, Belgium. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Art Faculty of Arkin University of Creative Arts and Design (ARUCAD), Cyprus. Her previous affiliations were with the Hunan Normal University in China and Azad University, Science and Research Branch, Iran. Elham’s articles have been published in different academic journals in English, Farsi and Chinese. Her research is positioned at the intersections of Iranian Arts and the early-modern and modern eras, iconology, book illustration, image-text relationships, gender representation and its historical transformation and cultural sociology. She has delivered her work and organized panels at various international conferences in North America, Europe, and Asia.