Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature in Middle Eastern Languages

Jeffrey Einboden (Ph.D, Cambridge) is Associate Professor of American Literature at Northern Illinois University. His research has appeared in Translation and Literature, Milton Quarterly, Middle Eastern Literatures, Journal of Qur’anic Studies, and the co-translated The Tangled Braid: Ninety-Nine Poems by Hafiz of Shiraz (Fons Vitae, 2009). Einboden’s ‘The Genesis of Weltliteratur’ (Literature and Theology, 2005) was named one of the 100 seminal articles published by Oxford University Press during the past century.

There is a global hermeneutic at work here, one that has so much more at play than what today goes by "globalisation".　 Literature - its translation, its interpretation, its cultural appropriation – provokes a sometimes uneasy reciprocity of tradition, value, and truth that, under Einboden’s meticulous and lucid scholarship, ripens and enriches what we mean by a global text and reader.

• Acknowledgments; Introduction; Part I: Scriptural Circulations; 1. Judaic Maccabæus; Longfellow & Joseph Massel; 2. Mahomet or Muḥammad?; Irving & ‘Alī Ḥusnī al-Kharbūtlī; Part II: Orienting the American Romance; 3. Inscribing the Persian Letter, Hawthorne & Sīmīn Dāneshvar; 4. Navigating the Arabic Whale; Melville & Iḥsān ‘Abbās; Part III: ‘I too am untranslatable’: Middle Eastern Leaves; 5. The New Bible in Hebrew, Whitman & Simon Halkin; 6. American ‘Song’ of Iraqi Exile, Whitman & Saadi Youssef; Notes; Bibliography.