Reading the early American canon through its Middle Eastern translations, Nineteenth-Century US Literature in Middle Eastern Languages examines prominent renditions of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman into Hebrew, Persian and Arabic. Tracing the revisionary processes which give rise to these Middle Eastern versions, the book argues that such translations offer unique and pivotal interpretations of their US sources, refiguring the American Renaissance through alterities of language, nationality and religion. The book suggests, ... More

Reading the early American canon through its Middle Eastern translations, Nineteenth-Century US Literature in Middle Eastern Languages examines prominent renditions of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman into Hebrew, Persian and Arabic. Tracing the revisionary processes which give rise to these Middle Eastern versions, the book argues that such translations offer unique and pivotal interpretations of their US sources, refiguring the American Renaissance through alterities of language, nationality and religion. The book suggests, in particular, that the importation of the US canon into arenas of Middle Eastern language serves to uncover implications latent within these American classics themselves, disclosing their compound cultural genealogies, while also promoting their complex participation within global cycles of textual transmission. Recovering Hebrew, Arabic and Persian renditions produced by seminal Middle Eastern artists and academics, the book also exposes illuminating readings of US literature previously neglected, accounting for the interpretations of prominent translators, novelists and scholars, such as Joseph Massel, Sīmīn Dāneshvar and Iḥsān ‘Abbās.