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List of contents
Introduction
Monica M. Ringer and Etienne E. Charrière
Thinking in French, Writing in Persian: Aesthetics, Intelligibility, and the Literary Turkish of the 1890s
Zeynep Seviner
How Not To Translate: Cultural Authenticity and Translatability in Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem's Araba Sevdasi and Ahmet Midhat Efendi's Felâtun Bey ile Râkim Efendi
Melih Levi
Beyond Binaries: Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s Prescriptive Modern
Monica M. Ringer
Cultivating Ottoman Citizens: Reading Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s Felâtun Bey ile Râkim Efendi with Âli Pasha’s Political Testament
Owen Green
Perils of the French Maiden: Women, Work, Virtue, and the Public Space in Some French Tales by Ahmet Midhat Efendi
A. Holly Shissler
The Tanzimat Novel in the Service of Science: On Ahmet Midhat Efendi's American Doctors
Ercüment Asil
Mizanci Murad’s Turfanda mi yoksa Turfa mi as Historical Novel
Benjamin C. Fortna
Inconvertible Romance: Piety, Community, and the Politically Disruptive Force of Love in Akabi Hikayesi
Neveser Köker
The Late Ottoman Novel as Social Laboratory: Celal Nuri and the Woman Question
Ayse Polat
Ottoman Babel: Language, Cosmopolitanism, and the Novel in the Long Tanzimat Period
Ali Bolcakan
Translating Communities: Reading Foreign Fiction Across Communal Boundaries in the Tanzimat Period
Etienne E. Charrière
The Tanzimat Period and its Diverse Cultures of Translation: Towards New Thinking in Comparative Literature
Özen Nergis Dolcerocca
List of Contributors
Bibliography
About the author
Professor of History and Asian Languages and Civilisations ar Amherst College, USA.
Summary
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.
