Literary Modernity Between the Middle East and Europe

Kamran Rastegar is lecturer in Arabic and Persian at the University of Edinburgh.  He researches cultural history, postcolonial studies, and the cinemas of Iran and the Arab world.

• Introduction 1. The Literary Abacus: Transactions in Nineteenth-Century Arabic, English and Persian Literatures Part 1: Nineteenth-Century Arabian Nights’ Biographies 2. Biographies of the Arabian Nights, An English Chapter 3. Modern Arabic and Persian Biographies of the Arabian Nights Part 2: Writing Travels and Other Transactions 4. The Inner Subjects of Arabic and Persian Travel Texts on Europe 5. On Nothing and Everything: Travel, Conversion, and the Transformation of (Ahmad) Faris al-Shidyaq, Arab Observer of Europe 6. Transactions and Translations: Hajji Baba Ispahani’s Value Between English and Persian Readerships. Epilogue: Towards Critical Philology

'...his mastery of a difficult body of texts in both Persian and Arabic is particularly impressive because it is so willing to go back and forth between the two. Traditionally an Arabist may cite Persian, but at arm's length, and vice versa. Rastegar seems equally at home in both traditions, and it would be hard to overemphasize how rare this is. It puts him in his own category as a comparatist.' - Michael Beard, University of North Dakota, The Translator, Volume 15