The Arabian Nights is the most famous Medieval Arabic collection of tales that brings together stories from different literary traditions, mainly Indian and Persian. It is a masterpiece of world literature, and there is an extensive body of scholarly work on it. Following its “rediscovery” by the French orientalist A. Galland in the 1700s and the publication of the printed Arabic editions in the 1800s, the collection became subject to prolific criticism. Over the past forty years, a new line of critical scholarship has concentrated upon the frame story of the Arabian Nights and its female protagonist Scheherazade. Perhaps inspired by the rewritings (and, thus, reinterpretations) of the tale in modern and contemporary fiction – like J. L. Borges, S. Rushdie, E. A. Poe, T. Hussein, N. Mahfouz and A. Djebar – the new criticism tries to engage real life with the tale and the figure of Scheherazade. This novel reception of the text testifies to a new sensibility in academic literature. Narrative is transformed into the open domain of different disciplines, as well as literary cultures at the confluence of the Arab world and the West. Feminist and gender approaches, psychoanalytic readings, and sociocultural and postcolonial perspectives combine literary theories with extra-literary areas of knowledge. The main subject of these analyses falls within the realm of otherness, i.e. the image of the other and the relationship with the other (sex) at the basis of the plot of the frame story, and its metaphorical implications. Their outcomes are often heterogeneous, to the point of generating, sometimes, diametrically opposed visions. Why is otherness in the frame story capable of embodying images (of the other sex) and meanings within but also outside the literary context? How have scholars received it? Why can their interpretations come to so different – even opposite - conclusions? The frame story of the Arabian Nights and its ample criticism deserves its own scrutiny. I will, therefore, provide an overview of the main trends in the interpretation of the tale, and how the image of the other and the relationship with the other sex is treated according to the intensions of the scholars, as well as to his/her area of study, theoretical framework and literary culture.