Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures

C. Ceyhun Arslan is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Koç University. His articles and book chapters have appeared in journals and edited volumes such as Journal of Mediterranean Studies, Journal of Arabic Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, Middle Eastern Literatures, The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry and Sea of Literatures: Towards a Theory of Mediterranean Literature. He has been recently awarded a Georg Forster Fellowship for Experienced Researchers from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

• AcknowledgementsNote On Translation and TransliterationIntroduction: Beyond the Influence Paradigm1. A Multilingual Ottoman Ocean: Taverns, Exclusions and Ziya Pasha’s Harabat2. Jurjī Zaydān, Literary Comparisons and the Formation of Arabic and Turkish Literatures3. The Ottoman Tarboosh: Disguise and the Novel Genre in Ahmet Midhat’s Hasan Mellah and Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī’s What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us4. Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr Weeps for Sultan Murad IV: Baghdad, Translation and the Turkish Language in Maʿrūf al-Ruṣāfī’s Works5. From ‘Ottoman Literature is Arabic Literature’ to ‘Arabs Possess a Literature’: Hacı İbrahim, Ahmet Rasim and the Fetters of Influence6. Family Matters: Oedipus, Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm and Ahmet Hamdi TanpınarConclusion: Modernity, Ottoman Saʿdī and Ottoman al-MutanabbīReferences

With an innovative focus on the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Middle East, The Ottoman Canon traces a theoretically informed analysis of the multilingual Ottoman literary "reservoir" as it informs mutually formative aspects of Turkish and Arabic national literatures. A well-researched study of multivalent cultural translation that will be of certain interest to specialists across multiple fields.