Recasting American and Persian Literatures

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. 

“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)

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.