"We Must Ourselves Write About Ourselves:" The Trans-Communal Rise of the Novel in the Late Ottoman Empire.

Abstract

Studying texts written in some of the main literary idioms of the late Ottoman Empire (primarily Greek and Armenian, as well as Ottoman-Turkish and Ladino) and examining cultural practices carried out by the corresponding ethno-linguistic groups, this dissertation surveys, across community boundaries, the development of a culture of the novel in Istanbul and Izmir during the long nineteenth century. Placing a special emphasis on the appropriation by Ottoman literati of cultural tropes elaborated in Western Europe, this project studies both the spread of the foreign novel in the Ottoman Empire and the rise of domestic fiction within a trans-communal framework. Highlighting the ways in which the hegemony of Western European fiction was at once affirmed and challenged in the Empire, the project lays the ground for a renewed understanding of the rise of the novel outside of the West.