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...