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.
