As she pauses her tale each night, her sister Dunyazad offers praise for these stories and Shahrazad in turn promises Shahriyar even more wonders the next night. These interruptions seldom indicate what the king thinks of this elaborate performance, but the storyteller lives on and the stories unfold night after night. While Victorian readers might expect a happy ending to Shahrazad’s brave effort to save her kingdom, the Arabic manuscripts do not offer such an easy resolution. In this respect, the Nights speaks less to the conventions of the European fairy tale than to the dystopian mode of
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