There are books like, oh, the Bible or the Art of War that have been spread across time and across cultures. They are revered in both their originating cultures and in the ones to which they’ve spread.
But are there works that received little recognition or respect at home yet commanded followers abroad? Were there great authors who wrote for the wrong audience, the wrong period, who weren’t really appreciated until rediscovered by a later people?
Does dissident/banned literature count? If so - The Gulag or Doctor Zhivago…
Moby Dick was unappreciated until long after Melville had died. Same country, but different time period.
A Christian would generally argue that the Old Testament is an example of this. Christians would say that the Jews misunderstood these texts and didn’t see their true message as foretelling the coming arrival of Jesus.
One Thousand and One Nights is more appreciated in the west than it is in the Middle East.
I have heard that Charles Dickens is extremely popular in Russia (or was - this may have been a late-Soviet-era thing). I doubt whether very many people in Britain read him for pleasure today (although they did in his time, of course).
The Japanese apparently have a fascination for Canada’s Anne of Green Gables.
Edgar Allan Poe, while appreciated in the US, is perhaps more respected in France.
If you look to other art forms, there’s Sixto Rodriguez (from “Searching for Sugar Man”) in South Africa and Australia.
And of course there’s Shakespeare and the Klingons.
Well, in the manga version she probably looks something like [this](http://jollyjack.deviantart.com/ art/Farm-Girl-42710228). (link broken as possibly NSFW)
Well, that was disappointing.
James Fenimore Cooper must have had some brilliant translators, because his prose is unreadable in England, but he was considered a literary giant in Europe-especially in Russia.
I don’t know if he’s more appreciated, but Jles Verne is apparently considered really great in Russia.
Among others, his novel The Children of Captain Grant (AKA In Search of the Castaways) was a major movie in the USSR. Decades later, the score from it was still being played, I’m told. Then they went and remade it into another popular flick.
in the US, it was made into a rather lame live-action film by Disney, which departed significantly from the book, and never achieved great popularity. AFAIK, there never was a French film version.
Maybe, but you can’t really say that Jews haven’t appreciated the Hebrew Bible, or appreciated it less than Christians.