This essay investigates the dynamics that led to the literary reception of Ernest Hemingway before the Islamic Revolution in Iran. This article deploys reception studies as a branch of Comparative Literature with a focus upon conceptions of Siegbert Salomon Prawer and the practical method of George Asselineau to unearth the ideological, political, and historical milieu that embraced Hemingway’s literary fortune in Iran. This investigation, unprecedented in the study of Iranian literature, discusses how and why Hemingway was initially received in Iran. As such, the inception of literary fortune of Ernest Hemingway in Iran is examined by the contextual features, Persian literary taste, and the translator’s incentives that paved the way for this reception. This article also uncovers the reasons for the delay in the literary reception of Hemingway in Iran and discussed why some of Hemingway’s oeuvres enjoyed recognition while others were neglected by the Iranian readership.

This article investigates how the literary reception of Ernest Hemingway in Iran in the first two decades after the Islamic Revolution is formed by cultural and ideological implications. The theoretical framework of this study is based on S.S. Prawer and Roger Asselineau’s notion of reception theory as a branch of study in comparative literature. The methodology entails a chronological study of translations, and cinematic adaptations of the author’s oeuvres. This study devotes itself to the study of the two most reprinted and translated works which depict a huge difference in the number of translations and reprints compared to Hemingway’s other works. As Such, the following outcomes are deliberated: besides the international fame of Hemingway, his continuing success in Iran can be related to the ideology of the translator, and the director, who deploy Hemingway’s novels as a prism to reflect Iranians’ stoic perseverance and mythical desire for freedom and fight against despotism as manifested in the legend of Jamshid. Hemingway’s code hero, undergoing stoic perseverance in hardship and war embody Iranians’ passage through a turbulent historical event after Revolution. Struggling with unemployment, war, and frustrated hopes, Iranians find Hemingway’s novels as a way to cope with arising problems during and after war. This article also explicates why reception of this particular work in Iran differs from its universal trend.