Last of an Age

In The Last of an Age, Sooyong Kim explores the relationship betweensocial change and the development of an Ottoman literary canon in thecourse of the sixteenth century by examining the work and reception ofa popular poet, Zati (1471–1546). Kim argues that a newly emergentgroup of bureaucratic literati, through the production of authoritative biographicaldictionaries, ultimately relegated Zati to a lesser literary age,driven by a self-fashioning that privileged broad linguistic ability, aboveall else, with poetry serving as the main vehicle for demonstrating that.This study is interdisciplinary in approach, taking insights from literarystudies, cultural history, and social theory. It adds to the scholarshipon the rise of early modern Ottoman canons in the fields of visual artsand music and complements recent work on court patronage. Framed byongoing critiques of canon formation among specialists of early modernEurope and late imperial China, the study offers a comparative perspectiveon those issues.