In Mundus Imaginalis, Hamid Dabashi exposes the Eurocentric worldview underlying the concept of world literature and maps an alternative vision in a centerless, pluralist world. Drawing on comparisons to the Persian literary tradition, Dabashi shows how imperial pasts cast a long and distorting shadow on cultural presents. Imperial imaginations outlast empires themselves, leaving “phantom empires” that perpetuate particular geographies of the world and arbitrate the literary. The Eurocentric idea of world literature domesticates and provincializes alternative ideas and conceptions, casting them as national allegories precisely at a time when Europe itself has been exposed for its own provinciality. Drawing on the classical Persian notion of the “imaginal world,” or mundus imaginalis, Dabashi retrieves a metaphysical foregrounding of worldly literature, charting a trajectory of thinkers whose literary imagination does not align with political desires for conquest, calculation, and consumption. Mundus Imaginalis shows how this imaginal world which gives root to all aesthetic acts maps an entirely distinct world of creative imagination.

Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is author of over twenty-five books, including Reversing the Colonial Gaze, Authority in Islam, and Truth and Narrative.

Introduction. Mundus Imaginalis as World Literatures  1
Part I. Stories and Histories
1. Imperial Imagination at the Roots of Literary Historiography  29
2. The Worlds of Encyclopedic Empires  49
Part II. Worlds of Persian Literary Imaginations
3. The Civilized World of the Wild  65
4. The Epic World of Mortals and Immortals  79
5. The Hidden World of Verisimilitude  95
6. Visions of Lost Worlds  113
7. Romancing the World  129
8. Roaming the Other World  143
9. The Global Map of Folk Heroes  157
Part III. Triumph of the Text: From Stylistics to Hermeneutics
10. The Resurrection of Liberated Texts Against Forced Contexts  171
11. The Stylistics of Literary Hermeneutics  185
12. Blossoming of a World Literature at Large  197
Conclusion. Mundus Imaginalis as the Sight of Paradise on Earth  211
Notes  219
Index