Bøker i Ottoman and Turkish Studies-serien

The Great War is still seen as a mostly European war. The Middle Eastern theatre is, at best, considered a sideshow written from the western perspective. This book fills a gap in the literature by giving an insight through annotated translations from Ottoman memoirs of actors who witnessed the last few years of Turkish presence in the Arab lands.

Recent historical studies on the Ottoman Empire have taken for granted that subjects of the Ottoman polity flourished under a so-called ""Pax Ottomanica"". This volume probes the rosy narrative of Ottoman tolerance that has long dominated the discussions.

This study moves the acclaimed Turkish fiction writer Bilge Karasu (1930-1995) into a new critical arena by examining his poetics of memory, as laid out in his narratives on Istanbul's Beyoglu, once a cosmopolitan neighborhood called Pera. Karasu established his fame in literary criticism as an experimental modernist, but while themes such as sexuality, gender, and oppression have received critical attention, an essential tenet of Karasu's oeuvre, the evocation of ethno-cultural identity, has remained unexplored: Excavating Memory brings to light this dimension. Through his non-referential and ambiguous renderings of memory, Karasu gives in his Beyoglu narratives unique expression to ethno-cultural difference in Turkish literature, and lets through his own repressed minority identity. By using Walter Benjamin's autobiographical work as a heuristic premise for illuminating Karasu, Gokberk establishes an innovative intercultural framework, which brings into dialogue two representative writers of the twentieth century over temporal and spatial distances.

This book is an invitation to rethink our understanding of Turkish literature as a tale of two "e;others."e; The first part of the book examines the contributions of non-Muslim authors, the "e;others"e; 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 "e;other"e; 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.

This volume is a tribute to Cemal Kafadar from his students, colleagues and friends.

This volume tells the story of the development and the organization of Ottoman libraries from the fourteenth through the twentieth century. The book surveys the phases through which the history of Ottoman libraries evolved and lays out the organization, the personnel, and day-to-day functioning of these institutions.