Prospero. Rivista di letterature e culture straniere
Abstract
Fairy tales belong to complex mythological and utopian worlds that settle in collective memory and cross fertilize literary works in different times. This is the case of the imaginary land of Jinnistan [Dschinnistan], introduced in the German literary debate during the last three decades of the XVIII century by Johann Gottfried Herder and then populated with characters and stories by the fantasy of Christoph Martin Wieland. The history of that Orient-related mythological landscape, will be interpreted as a “Denkbild”, and will be followed throughout the intertextual references present in the work of later authors Novalis and Karl May. Since images, and especially “images of thought”, are rooted in a complex biocultural network, such an investigation requires a broad outlook on those intertextual references in order to interpret the relevance of their traces within a literary anthropological frame. To this end, we will analyse the creation of the complex mythological world of Jinnistan referring to the framework of cultural studies and to the paradigm of cultural memory, understood as collective, identity shaping and embedded, to finally reflect on the anthropological value of this recurrent image of thought as a mean of resistance in times of crisis and of increased existential fear.
