A transnational study of the American Renaissance which explores the literary circulation of Middle Eastern translations of 19th-century U.S. literature. In a pioneering approach to classic U.S. Literature, Jeffrey Einboden traces the global afterlives of literary icons from Washington Irving to Walt Whitman and analyses 19th-century American authors as they now appear in Arabic, Hebrew and Persian translation. Crossing linguistic, cultural and national boundaries, Middle Eastern renditions of U.S. texts are interrogated as critical readings and illuminating revisions of their American sources. Why does Moby-Dick both invite and resist Arabic translation? What are the religious and aesthetic implications of re-writing Leaves of Grass in Hebrew? How does rendering The Scarlet Letter into Persian transform Hawthorne's infamous symbol? Uncovering the choices and changes made by prominent Middle Eastern translators, this study is the first to reveal the significance of 'orienting' American classics, dem

This book is a comparative study of the development of English, Persian and Arabic literature and their interrelations with specific reference to modernity, nationalism and social value.

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.

This book provides a new map of American literature in the global era, analyzing the multiple meanings of transnationalism.

As Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin traveled around the world, it was molded by the imaginations and needs of international audiences. For over 150 years it has been coopted for a dazzling array of causes far from what its author envisioned. This book tells thirteen variants of Uncle Tom’s journey, explicating the novel’s significance for Canadian abolitionists and the Liberian political elite that constituted the runaway characters’ landing points; nineteenth-century French theatergoers; liberal Cuban, Romanian, and Spanish intellectuals and social reformers; Dutch colonizers and Filipino nationalists in Southeast Asia; Eastern European Cold War communists; Muslim readers and spectators in the Middle East; Brazilian television audiences; and twentieth-century German holidaymakers. Throughout these encounters, Stowe’s story of American slavery serves as a paradigm for understanding oppression, selectively and strategically refracting the African American slave onto other iconic victims and freedom fighters. The book brings together performance historians, literary critics, and media theorists to demonstrate how the myriad cultural and political effects of Stowe’s enduring story has transformed it into a global metanarrative with national, regional, and local specificity.

By looking beyond the page and into the extraordinary lives of Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Grace Greenwood, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Frederick Douglass, this book uncovers their startling contributions to transatlantic culture and makes the argument that literature is dependent upon other modes of professional creativity in order to thrive. Leslie Elizabeth Eckel shows how these six figures shaped their careers in the fields of education, journalism, public lecturing and editing in productive relation to their development as imaginative writers. To see Walt Whitman co-producing foreign editions of his work with British poets while exuberantly breaking free from verse strictures on the page, or to witness Margaret Fuller reporting from the battle ground in revolutionary Rome as well as writing her country's first feminist treatise is to comprehend more deeply the ways in which these writers acted in the transatlantic sphere. By practicing Atlantic citizenship, they were able to achieve critical distance from the United States and, paradoxically, to catalyse its ongoing growth.

Fossil Poetry provides the first book-length overview of the place of Anglo-Saxon in nineteenth-century poetry in English. It addresses the use and role of Anglo-Saxon as a resource by Romantic and Victorian poets in their own compositions, as well as the construction and 'invention' of Anglo-Saxon in and by nineteenth-century poetry. Fossil Poetry takes its title from a famous passage on 'early' language in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and uses the metaphor of the fossil to contextualize poetic Anglo-Saxonism within the developments that had been taking place in the fields of geology, palaeontology, and the evolutionary life sciences since James Hutton's apprehension of 'deep time' in his 1788 Theory of the Earth. Fossil Poetry argues that two, roughly consecutive phases of poetic Anglo-Saxonism took place over the course of the nineteenth century: firstly, a phase of 'constant roots' whereby Anglo-Saxon is constructed to resemble, and so to legitimize a tradition of English Romanticism conceived as essential and unchanging; secondly, a phase in which the strangeness of many of the 'extinct' philological forms of early English is acknowledged, and becomes concurrent with a desire to recover and recuperate the fossils of Anglo-Saxon within contemporary English poetry. The volume advances new readings of work by a variety of poets including Walter Scott, Henry Longfellow, William Wordsworth, William Barnes, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Morris, Alfred Tennyson, and Gerard Hopkins.