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This introductory chapter considers reasons for the relative invisibility of the southern continent within the self-understanding of the United States. With reference to colonial pioneers and explorers of the 19^th century, it discusses how American literature has positioned itself in relation to British political legacies in India as well as Australia. In relation to the aesthetics of surrealism, it describes how the antipodean motif of a “world upside down” has become a hallmark of surrealist painting as well as writing, and how contemporary cultures of globalization have brought Australia and America more recently into conceptual juxtaposition. It also suggests how the idea of “antipodean America” fits with the idea of a transnational turn in American literary studies.

In this report, Paul de Man reviews the Comparative Literature Program at Rutgers University. The report is based on extensive interviews with most of the faculty members involved in the Comparative Literature Program at Rutgers, as well as with numerous graduate and undergraduate students. The document prepared by the internal faculty and entitled ‘A Report on the History and Activities of the New Brunswick Discipline’ has proven to be very informative in the preparation of this report. It describes the history and the objectives of the department in clear and objective terms and tells how the faculty tried to meet the recommendations of the earlier Greene report (1975). The report contains general considerations and recommendations related to both the undergraduate and graduate programs and faculty.

Examines Ezra Pound’s aborted career as a Hispanist and translator of Spanish texts, from the late medieval Poema del Cid to romanceros (ballads), and his attacks on Germanic philology and his promotion of a comparative, poeticized mode of scholarship. His overlapping poetry and scholarship, dramatized the historical decline of Spanish literature, but insisted that imperial and literary flourishing must be separated. Together with Dos Passos, Pound illustrates the investment of modernist aesthetics, especially the signature style of fragmentation, in the new academic formations of the early twentieth century.

This chapter proposes a revision of Dionyýz Ďurišin's concept of interliterary community and Pierre Bourdieu's concept of Field, in order to explain the possibilities of an inner comparative frame in Catalonia, in the context of Iberian peninsula. The main reflection by Ďurišin is a good framework to understand the place of Catalan literature within European literature in the twentieth century. But it is necessary to consider that interliterariness is deeply conditioned by tensions between the political, intellectual and literary fields. Catalonia develops a double interliterary process: on one hand, it belongs to the Iberian interliterary community, but on the other hand it relates to literatures written in Spanish in Catalonia and to an increasing number of works written in other languages there. In addition, Catalan literature has always been in functional proximity to European and American literatures. So a new definition of interliterary community from a Catalan point of view must take cognizance of the fact that Catalan literature relates to other literatures both outside and inside its nominal space, in a double dimension almost unique in Europe. In this respect, Catalan literature may play a key role in the contemporary redefinition of European cultural identity.

This chapter provides the first systematic analysis of the presence of Persia in nineteenth-century English poetry. In doing so, the chapter relies on the categories of texts and typologies that are outlined in Chapter One in The Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry as a conceptual basis to describe the environments of knowledge within which the image of Persia was defined and disseminated in the nineteenth century. Using the chronological arrangement of Chapter One, this chapter is able to suggest some thematic correlations between nineteenth-century ‘Persianised’ poems. In order to discern the image of Persia, the chapter employs keyword searches of literary databases, principally Literature Online (LION), with additional data from the British Library Catalogue. The focus is not limited to a corpus of works that were written specifically on or about Persia, but takes account of a broader selection of material. Poems are identified primarily through the use of certain keywords: besides ‘Persia’ itself, and its cognates, such as ‘Iran’, the names of persons (Cyrus, Xerxes, Esther), and places (Shiraz, Isfahan, Nishapur), together with a selection of words commonly associated with Persian literature and culture (e.g. qazal, bulbul, dervish) are utilised.

The popular literature of the 1940s often crossed boundaries between the popular and the elite as well as between modernism and romanticism. New positions became possible in the literary field, and writers like Xu Xu and Wumingshi exemplify these trends. They appropriated styles and tropes from earlier modernist writings in Chinese literature, thereby creating hybrid works that were among the most popular of the age. This chapter compares the writers covered in this study in terms of their depiction of modernity, narrative style, representation of the supernatural, and position in the literary field. Overall, the differences are found to outweigh the similarities, but the comparison highlights how various themes were adopted and adapted into popular literature of the 1940s from the New Sensationist writers of the preceding decade, showing their lasting impact.

This chapter approaches Matthew Arnold’s poem from various angles: it first considers the poem’s Persian origin, looking at Firdausi’s background, his Shāhnāmeh, the history of its composition and the political context in which it was created. It then focuses on the episode of ‘Sohrāb’. Knowledge of Firdausi’s ‘original’ is crucial in this context not because Arnold knew it, but because he did not. Arnold never read Firdausi. He wrote his version of ‘Sohrāb’ after he read, in French, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve’s ‘Le Livre des Rois’ (1850), a review of Julius von Mohl's translation of Firdausi’s Shāhnāmeh. In the chain of interpretation from Mohl to Sainte-Beuve to Arnold, only Mohl had read the Persian text. Arnold’s appropriation of Firdausi’s characters, setting and mythical substance is conditioned by this complex transmission, in which Mohl’s poetics, and Sainte-Beuve’s cultural politics, play a significant role. The aim here is to unravel and explore the complexity of this process of literary appropriation, exposing the paradoxical nature of Sainte-Beuve’s role, since he both enabled Arnold to write the poem and implicitly challenged the ‘authority’ of any modern poet to rival a ‘primary’ epic poet such as Firdausi.

The claim in this chapter is that FitzGerald, without being literal in his rendition of the quatrains attributed to Khayyám, succeeded in transmitting a Persian spirit in his Rubáiyát. In its detailed comparison of FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát to his Persian original(s), the chapter as such offers new insights into FitzGerald’s translation practice and the poetics of his creation. The emphasis is almost wholly on these specific comparisons, which enrich and supplement the work done on the poem by previous critiques such as Arberry’s The Romance of the Rubaiyat (1959). But the argument here goes beyond a comparative literary analysis. FitzGerald succeeded in transfusing a Persian soul into his re-writing of the rubáiyát by importing matter of peculiar Persian significance, elements that may look foreign to English readers of the poem, but quintessentially Persian to those who are acquainted with the particulars of Persian literary and cultural traditions. In order to unearth these hidden peculiarities, the Rubáiyát ought to be read with, so to speak, a Persian eye; it has to be read as a native critic would, for instance, study the poetry of Hāfiz.

Ira Nadel looks at the comparative literature milieu of Pound’s education at the University of Pennsylvania and Hamilton College in the first decade of the twentieth century. Pound believed that “only the classics can keep one free from the cant and vagueness found in [one’s] contemporaries.” He resolved that “to become modern was to absorb the ancients.” Nadel examines a number of Pound’s early poems (“Apparuit,” “Papyrus,” “Night Litany”), through quantity.” especially for their “metrical elements,” including quantitative Sapphic verse, classical musicality, “the classical reliance on allusion, citation and prosodic inventions,” fragments of lost Greek texts, and what Pound would later call “absolute rhythm,” in which a poem’s prosody “corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed, often through quantity.” The implementation of classical meters, as T. S. Eliot would observe, would distinguish Pound’s modernist verse from the poetry in English of both the recent past and the present. From the start Pound’s verse would locate the contemporary in the distant past of other cultures.