The Warring Sheherezade: Tradition and Folklore in the Iraqi Drama

Contemporary Arab writers of various fields of literature incessantly look back towards the past of human communities, particularly that of their own. This trend has developed since the middle of the 19th century, i.e. from the beginning of the Arab Renaissance. Iraqi authors shared this attitude. Such pairs of notions like the past and revolution, tradition and renewal irrevocably entered literature, and they had wide repercussions in the Iraqi drama of the successive decades. In this article, I would like to confine myself to the wide semantic field of the notion of tradition.