Recasting American and Persian Literatures: Local Histories and Formative Geographies from Moby-Dick to Missing Soluch

This title is printed to order. This book may have been self-published. If so, we cannot guarantee the quality of the content. In the main most books will have gone through the editing process however some may not. We therefore suggest that you be aware of this before ordering this book. If in doubt check either the author or publisher’s details as we are unable to accept any returns unless they are faulty. Please contact us if you have any questions.

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.