Shahrazad in Cronulla: David Foster's Retelling of One Thousand and One Nights in Sons of the Rumour

This reading of David Foster’s Sons of the Rumour focuses on its

frame story, a reworking of the frame story of One Thousand and

One Nights. It provides an overview of the impact of One

Thousand and One Nights on world literature and goes on to

analyse how Foster reimagines One Thousand and One Nights in

order to illustrate humanity’s struggle between the spiritual and

the material world. Foster constructs a parallel dilemma for Al

Morrisey, a secular Australian Jew, and the Shah, a Persian Muslim.

Differences between them favours Al’s secularism over the Shah’s

Islamic faith, and tends to harden and exaggerate stereotypes,

following a typical Orientalist pattern by recreating the structure

of One Thousand and One Nights for a Western understanding of

and taste for Orientalist material.