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.