Persian Literature as World Literature - (Literatures as World Literature) by Mostafa Abedinifard & Omid Azadibougar & Amirhossein Vafa (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Confronting nationalistic and nativist interpreting practices in Persianate literary scholarship, Persian Literature as World Literature makes a case for reading these literatures as world literature-as transnational, worldly texts that expand beyond local and national penchants. Working through an idea of world literature that is both cosmopolitan and critical of any monologic view on globalization, the contributors to this volume revisit the early and contemporary circulation of Persianate literatures across neighboring and distant cultures, and seek innovative ways of developing a transnational Persian literary studies, engaging in constructive dialogues with the global forces surrounding, and shaping, Persianate societies and cultures.

Review Quotes

"The power and delight of literature in Persian is known to many readers, worldwide. But how is this magnificent literature related to recent debates on coloniality, nationalism, and world literature? With this collection of studies, we begin to know. The authors' rich scholarship explores both historical and contemporary problems." --Raewyn Connell, University Chair, University of Sydney, Australia, and author of Southern Theory: Social Science and the Global Dynamics of Knowledge (2007)

"This collection of essays is excellent because the theoretical and methodological issues they discuss are not just important for rethinking the study of Persian literature, but are highly relevant to the study of any non-Western literature. Anyone interested in literary studies, particularly in comparative and cross-cultural studies, will find a lot in this collection to be stimulating, thought-provoking, and beneficial. Highly recommended!" --Zhang Longxi, Chair Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation, City University of Hong Kong, and author of From Comparison to World Literature (2014)

"The contributors to this volume approach Persian literary criticism with sensitivity and seek to liberate the field from nationalist frameworks that all too often have hindered the study of Persian literature in the west. The essays collected here open our eyes to the diverse ways in which the Persian literary system has influenced other transnational literary systems and how, in turn, it has been shaped by those encounters over the past millennium and more." --Dominic Parviz Brookshaw, Associate Professor of Persian Literature, University of Oxford, UK

About the Author

Mostafa Abedinifard is Assistant Professor without Review of Persian Literary Culture and Civilization at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

Omid Azadibougar is Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation at Hunan Normal University, China. He is the author of World Literature and Hedayat's Poetics of Modernity (2020) and The Persian Novel: Ideology, Fiction and Form in the Periphery (2014).

Amirhossein Vafa is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Shiraz University, Iran. He is the author of Recasting American and Persian Literatures (2016).