| Sumario: | This article juxtaposes the writings of three seventeenth-century authors—the Moroccan Sufi al-Ḥasan al-Yūsī (d. 1691), the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō (d. 1694), and the English physician Thomas Browne (d. 1682)—and asks what type of theoretical framing is productive considering all three authors' general lack of interest in geographic and literary worlds beyond their own. All three were profoundly religious, all three referred back to a literary canon produced in places they themselves had never visited, and all three attained literary prominence if not canonical status in the literary traditions they mastered. The article moves past recent discussions of the dilemmas of world and global literature to focus, in light of the contemporary hegemony of English and the Anglophone academy, on parallel symmetries of these authors' literary efforts in their evocation of past canons and contemporary religious projects.
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