Ottoman Culture and the Project of Modernity: Reform and Translation in the Tanzimat Novel

Description

Central to the nineteenth-century Ottoman Tanzimat reform project, the novel originally developed outside of Ottoman space, yet was adopted as a didactic tool to model and generate new forms of Ottoman citizenship. Essays in this book explore the appropriation of the novel as a literary genre and its deployment in the late Ottoman cultural project of constructing an Ottoman modernity. Analyzing key texts and authors, from the works of Ahmet Midhat Efendi to Mizanci Murad and Vartan Pasha, among others, the book’s chapters explore the novel genre as far more than a case of importation of Western and non-Ottoman cultural productions, but rather as a vehicle for the cultivation of indigenous modern subjectivities. Cover page Halftitle page Title page Copyright page Contents Notes on Contributors Introduction The nineteenth century as the Age of Reform Tanzimat as translation Reform as translation The novel of reform, the novel as reform At the nexus of history and literature, form and function Notes 1 Thinking in French, writing in Persian: Aesthetics, intelligibility and the literary Turkish of the 1890s Notes 2 How not to translate: Cultural authenticity and translatability in Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem’s Araba Sevdası and Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s Felatun Bey ile Rakım Efendi Notes 3 Beyond binaries: Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s prescriptive modern Notes 4 Cultivating Ottoman citizens: Reading Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s Felatun Bey ile Rakım Efendi with Ali Pasha’s political testament Morality and translation Towards a new public morality Top-down reform, and representation and consultation in government Networks of Ottoman identity: The ‘bottom-up’ approach Conclusion Notes 5 Perils of the french maiden: Women, work, virtue and the public space in some french tales by Ahmet Midhat Efendi Notes 6 The Tanzimat novel in the service of science: On Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s American Doctors ‘Scientific Literature’ as a genre Science and morality in Ottoman modernity Acknowledgement Notes 7 Mizancı Murad’s Turfanda mı yoksa Turfa mi? as historical novel Notes 8 Inconvertible romance: Piety, community and the politically disruptive force of love in Akabi Hikayesi Theoretical framework and brief history of conversion in the Tanzimat Era Reading and conversion: constitutions, novels and Chateaubriand’s Atala Inconvertible romance: Piety, community and the disruptive force of love and desire Conclusion: Imperial survival and the limits of conversion as modality of political belonging Archival Collections Consulted Notes 9 The late Ottoman novel as social laboratory: Celal Nuri and the ‘woman question’ Theorizing and practising the novel Notes 10 Ottoman Babel: Language, cosmopolitanism and the novel in the long Tanzimat period Notes 11 Translating communities: Reading foreign fiction across communal boundaries in the Tanzimat period Notes 12 The Tanzimat period and its diverse cultures of translation: Towards new thinking in comparative literature Notes Bibliography Index