Abstract
This paper examines a number of methodological issues specific to comparative literature, based on a work that has become a classic: the collection of tales from the Thousand and One Nights. The main aim is to analyze the worldwide circulation of the text, based on the translation published between 1704 and 1712 by orientalist Antoine Galland, a professor at the Collège de France. Is it reallya literary work, or a series of literary works ? Is it a " classic " of world literature ? Or is it a representative text of " Arabic " or " Oriental " literature? The history of the text's worldwide circulation, considered in the form of the conceptual metaphor of the library, invites us to relativize essential categories of literary analysis, and allows us to better problematize the categories of orality and writing.
