Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s famous 1875 novel Felâtun Bey and Râkim Efendi takes place in late nineteenth-century Istanbul and follows the lives of two young men who come from radically different backgrounds. Râkim Efendi is an erudite, self-made man, one who is ambitious and cultivated enough to mingle with a European crowd. In contrast, Felâtun Bey is a spendthrift who lacks intellectual curiosity and a strong work ethic. Squandering his wealth and education, he leads a life of decadence. The novel traces Râkim and Felâtun’s relationships with multiple characters, charting their romances and passions, as well as their foibles and amusing mishaps as they struggle to find and follow their own path through the many temptations and traps of European culture. The author creates a rich portrait of stratified Ottoman life through a diverse and colorful cast of characters—from a French piano teacher and an Arab nanny, to a Circassian slave girl—each deftly navigating the shifting mores of their social class. Written during the Ottoman Empire’s uneasy transition to modernity, the novel’s protagonists embody both the best and worst elements of two worlds, European and Ottoman. The novel provides readers with an elegant yet powerful appeal for progressive reforms and individual freedoms. Levi and Ringer’s fluid translation of this Ottoman classic stands as a landmark in the history of Turkish literature in translation.

Presents a comprehensive A-to-Z reference to the empire that once encompassed large parts of the modern-day Middle East, North Africa, and southeastern Europe.

Using a wealth of contemporary Ottoman sources, this book recreates the social history of Istanbul, a huge, cosmopolitan metropolis and imperial capital of the Ottoman Empire. Seat of the Sultan and an opulent international emporium, Istanbul was also a city of violence shaken regularly by natural disasters and by the turmoil of sultanic politics and violent revolt. Its inhabitants, entertained by imperial festivities and cared for by the great pious foundations which touched every aspect of their lives, also amused themselves in the numerous pleasure gardens and the many public baths of the city. While the book is focused on Istanbul, it presents a broad picture of Ottoman society, how it was structured and how it developed and transformed across four centuries. As such, the book offers an exciting alternative to the more traditional histories of the Ottoman Empire.

The Turkish Novel and the Quest for Rationality is the first book to contextualize the Turkish novel with regard to the intellectual developments motivating the Turkish modernization project since the 18th century. The book provides a dialectical narrative for the emergence and development of the Turkish novel in order to highlight the genre’s critical role within the modernization project. In doing so, it also delineates the changing forms the novel assumes in the Turkish context from a platform for new literature to a manifestation of crisis in the face of totalizing rationality. Vis-a-vis modernization's engagement with rationality, The Turkish Novel and the Quest for Rationality reveals unexplored ways of conceptualizing the development of the genre in non-western contexts.

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.

Is it possible to generate "capitalist spirit" in a society, where cultural, economic and political conditions did not unfold into an industrial revolution, and consequently into an advanced industrial-capitalist formation? This is exactly what some prominent public intellectuals in the late Ottoman Empire tried to achieve as a developmental strategy; long before Max Weber defined the notion of capitalist spirit as the main motive behind the development of capitalism. This book demonstrates how and why Ottoman reformists adapted (English and French) economic theory to the Ottoman institutional setting and popularized it to cultivate bourgeois values in the public sphere as a developmental strategy. It also reveals the imminent results of these efforts by presenting examples of how bourgeois values permeated into all spheres of socio-cultural life, from family life to literature, in the late Ottoman Empire. The text examines how the interplay between Western European economic theories and the traditional Muslim economic cultural setting paved the way for a new synthesis of a Muslim-capitalist value system; shedding light on the emergence of capitalism—as a cultural and an economic system—and the social transformation it created in a non-Western, and more specifically, in the Muslim Middle Eastern institutional setting. This book will be of great interest to scholars of modern Middle Eastern history, economic history, and the history of economic thought.

This book is an invitation to rethink our understanding of Turkish literature as a tale of two “others.” The first part of the book examines the contributions of non-Muslim authors, the “others” of modern Turkey, to the development of Turkish literature during the late Ottoman and early republican period, focusing on the works of largely forgotten authors. The second part discusses Turkey as the “other” of the West and the way authors writing in Turkish challenged orientalist representations. Thus this book prepares the ground for a history of literature which uncouples language and religion and recreates the spaces of dialogue and exchange that have existed in late Ottoman Turkey between members of various ethno-religious communities.