Overview
- Disrupts traditional views of “World Literature” through rethinking conceptions of American and Persian literatures within the global literary space
- Connects literatures often not associated through comparative analyses between Melville’s Moby-Dick and Dowlatabadi’s Missing Soluch
- Offers cross-appeal to scholars interested in comparative literature, world literatures, American Studies, Persian Literature, Iranian Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies
Part of the book series: Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World (LCIW)
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Table of contents (5 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
Reading literary and cinematic events between and beyond American and Persian literatures, this book questions the dominant geography of the East-West divide, which charts the global circulation of texts as World Literature. Beyond the limits of national literary historiography, and neocolonial cartography of world literary discourse, the minor character Parsee Fedallah in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) is a messenger who travels from the margins of the American literature canon to his Persian literary counterparts in contemporary Iranian fiction and film, above all, the rural woman Mergan in Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s novel Missing Soluch (1980). In contention with Eurocentric treatments of world literatures, and in recognition of efforts to recast the worldliness of American and Persian literatures, this book maintains that aesthetic properties are embedded in their local histories and formative geographies.
Reviews
“This book freshly recasts a ‘politics of defiance’ out of the Asian drifter Fedallah’s outcast voice in Moby-Dick to pledge an insurgent sanity in comparative literary studies. Vafa’s postcanonical geography refederates Fedallah within a transtemporal crew of Iranian, Zoroastrian, and Palestinian characters along the creative keel of a democratic journey that charts new routes of literary worldliness.” (Timothy Marr, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA)
“I loved this work. A fascinating and original scholarly endeavor, Recasting American and Persian Literatures is a very welcome intervention marking the boundaries of a new comparative literature that is as necessary as it is timely. The frame of comparison, the use of secondary sources and the contextualized readings of the three primary texts explored in the work are all but masterful.” (Kamran Rastegar, Associate Professor, Department of International Literary and Cultural Studies, Tufts University, USA)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Amirhossein Vafa is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Shiraz University. He obtained his doctorate in English (and Comparative) Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK. Amir specializes in the cross-cultural examination of American and Persian literatures, and has also written on representations of men and masculinities in contemporary Iranian fiction.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Recasting American and Persian Literatures
Book Subtitle: Local Histories and Formative Geographies from Moby-Dick to Missing Soluch
Authors: Amirhossein Vafa
Series Title: Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40469-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-40468-4Published: 20 December 2016
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-82110-8Published: 10 July 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-40469-1Published: 09 December 2016
Series ISSN: 2945-705X
Series E-ISSN: 2945-7068
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 204
Number of Illustrations: 1 illustrations in colour
Topics: Comparative Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Postcolonial/World Literature