Pierre Cachia slipped away peacefully on 1 April 2017, a few days shy of his ninety-sixth birthday, surrounded by his children and grandchildren. With the passing of this key architect of Arabic studies, those of us who have studied and worked with him will not only mourn the loss of a friend, teacher, and mentor, but also the irretrievable era in which a first generation of postwar American and European Arabists and Orientalists made tremendous strides in fashioning academic studies of modern Arabic literature into what it is today: grounded in native fluency of the Arabic language, informed by real experiences lived in close proximity with Arab writers and storytellers, and took seriously the concerns and priorities of Arab scholars, critics, and intellectuals.

This article traces the metamorphoses of Scheherazade, the heroine of The Thousand and One Nights' frame-tale, in modern fiction and film. It examines these metamorphoses in the context of a discussion of the function of narrative across cultures and disciplines. It looks more particularly at the role of genre ideologies—paradigms of knowledge implicit in generic expectations, ideologies external to genre, and subjectivities in narrative transformation—in transforming the story as it travels in time and across media of expression and cultures. Analysis of the Nights frame-tale, the story of Scheherazade, and its transformations, is further informed by an interrogation of the process of reading ‘texts’ critically. Do genre, ideology and subjectivity inform our readings of ‘texts’? In what ways do paradigms of knowledge perceived as inherent in these categories in turn affect our understanding of story and narrative?