ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter I have explored how Ahmad Faris Shidyaq’s exploration of the limits of subjective representation in modern literary work also sets in relief the limits of the nineteenth-century travel text’s conventional ambitions to articulate the emergence of the self into society through the representation of the experience of travel. The following chapter will look at how the confluence of travel writing and translation came to bring about a text imbued with a similar fertile ambiguity as that which made Alf layla wa layla such an important text in modern Western European, Arab and Iranian contexts. Here, I will discuss the writing and publication of a marginal (if commercially successful) English faux travel-text, and will follow how this text came to be re-evaluated in its translation into Persian. Here, I hope to bring together discussions that emerge from part two of this book-touching on issues such as the changes to the notion of literary value in this period, and the role of these changes in producing a concept of literary modernityinto conversation with the discussions of the previous two chapters-those concerning changes to literary approaches to the question of character and subjectivity as articulated in nineteenth-century travel writing. As read through the shifting value of a nineteenth-century colonial text, which through translation was implicated into revolutionary and anti-colonial contexts, the following discussion will present a case study for understanding how this complex mosaic of issues relates to our comprehension of the categories of both literature and modernity.
