arabesque

arabesque, in literature, a contrived intricate pattern of verbal expression, so called by analogy with a decorative style in which flower, fruit, and sometimes animal outlines appear in elaborate patterns of interlaced lines. That these designs can sometimes suggest fantastic creatures may have given rise to another sense of the term, denoting a tale of wonder or of the supernatural. Nikolay Gogol used this sense of the word in his Arabeski (1835; Arabesques) five years before Edgar Allan Poe collected some of his tales under the title Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Like those of Poe, Gogol’s tales of hallucination, confusing reality and dream, are among his best stories (“Nevsky Prospect” and “Diary of a Madman,” both 1835). The word is French and means “intricate ornament,” which is related to the Italian arabesco, literally, “an ornament in the style of the Arabs.”