This represents the first modern introduction to literary Ottoman available in English. The author has devised this textbook to provide a course of lessons, readings and exercises to take the student from beginner to intermediate level. The book features numerous readings taken from historiography, historical, literary, journalistic and legal sources from the 16th to the 20th century. This will be an essential tool for Ottomanists and other scholars in a broad range of academic disciplines that include Ottoman history and literature, language, art, music and architecture of the former empire.

This represents the first modern introduction to literary Ottoman available in English. The author has devised this textbook to provide a course of lessons, readings and exercises to take the student from beginner to intermediate level. The book features numerous readings taken from historiography, historical, literary, journalistic and legal sources from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. This will be an essential tool for Ottomanists and other scholars in a broad range of academic disciplines that include Ottoman history and literature, language, art, music and architecture of the former empire.

"A work of dazzling beauty...the rare coming together of historical scholarship and curiosity about distant places with luminous writing." --The New York Times Book Review Since the Turks first shattered the glory of the French crusaders in 1396, the Ottoman Empire has exerted a long, strong pull on Western minds. For six hundred years, the Empire swelled and declined. Islamic, martial, civilized, and tolerant, in three centuries it advanced from the dusty foothills of Anatolia to rule on the Danube and the Nile; at the Empire's height, Indian rajahs and the kings of France beseeched its aid. For the next three hundred years the Empire seemed ready to collapse, a prodigy of survival and decay. Early in the twentieth century it fell. In this dazzling evocation of its power, Jason Goodwin explores how the Ottomans rose and how, against all odds, they lingered on. In the process he unfolds a sequence of mysteries, triumphs, treasures, and terrors unknown to most American readers. This was a place where pillows spoke and birds were fed in the snow; where time itself unfolded at a different rate and clocks were banned; where sounds were different, and even the hyacinths too strong to sniff. Dramatic and passionate, comic and gruesome, Lords of the Horizons is a history, a travel book, and a vision of a lost world all in one.

Even a casual perusal of seventeenth-century European print production makes clear that the Turk was on everyone’s mind. Europe’s confrontation of and interaction with the Ottoman Empire in the face of what appeared to be a relentless Ottoman expansion spurred news delivery and literary production in multiple genres, from novels and sermons to calendars and artistic representations. The trans-European conversation stimulated by these media, most importantly the regularly delivered news reports, not only kept the public informed but provided the basis for literary conversations among many seventeenth-century writers, three of whom form the center of this inquiry: Daniel Speer (1636-1707), Eberhard Werner Happel (1647-1690), and Erasmus Francisci (1626-1694). The expansion of the Ottoman Empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries offers the opportunity to view these writers' texts in the context of Europe and from a more narrowly defined Ottoman Eurasian perspective. Ottoman Eurasia in Early Modern German Literature: Cultural Translations (Francisci, Happel, Speer) explores the variety of cultural and commercial conversations between Europe and Ottoman Eurasia as they negotiated their competing economic and hegemonic interests. Brought about by travel, trade, diplomacy, and wars, these conversations were, by definition, “cross-cultural” and diverse. They eroded the antagonism of “us and them,” the notion of the European center and the Ottoman periphery that has historically shaped the view of European-Ottoman interactions.

The Ottoman Empire was one of the most significant forces in world history and yet little attention is paid to its rich cultural life. For the people of the Ottoman Empire, lyrical poetry was the most prized literary activity. People from all walks of life aspired to be poets. Ottoman poetry was highly complex and sophisticated and was used to express all manner of things, from feelings of love to a plea for employment. This collection offers free verse translations of 75 lyric poems from the mid-fourteenth to the early twentieth centuries, along with the Ottoman Turkish texts and, new to this expanded edition, photographs of printed, lithographed, and hand-written Ottoman script versions of several of the texts--a bonus for those studying Ottoman Turkish. Biographies of the poets and background information on Ottoman history and literature complete the volume.

In the wake of the fear that gripped Europe after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, English dramatists, like their continental counterparts, began representing the Ottoman Turks in plays inspired by historical events. The Ottoman milieu as a dramatic setting provided English audiences with a common experience of fascination and fear of the Other. The stereotyping of the Turks in these plays—revolving around complex themes such as tyranny, captivity, war, and conquests—arose from their perception of Islam. The Ottomans' failure in the second siege of Vienna in 1683 led to the reversal of trends in the representation of the Turks on stage. As the ascending strength of a web of European alliances began to check Ottoman expansion, what then began to dazzle the aesthetic imagination of eighteenth century England was the sultan's seraglio with images of extravaganza and decadence. In this book, Esin Akalin draws upon a selective range of seventeenth and eighteenth century plays to reach an understanding, both from a non-European perspective and Western standpoint, how one culture represents the other through discourse, historiography, and drama. The book explores a cluster of issues revolving around identity and difference in terms of history, ideology, and the politics of representation. In contextualizing political, cultural, and intellectual roots in the ideology of representing the Ottoman/Muslim as the West’s Other, the author tackles with the questions of how history serves literature and to what extent literature creates history.

How are historians and social scientists to understand the emergence, the multiplicity, and the mutability of collective memories of the Ottoman Empire in the political formations that succeeded it? With contributions focussing on several of the nation-states whose peoples once were united under the aegis of Ottoman suzerainty, this volume proposes new theoretical approaches to the experience and transmission of the past through time. Developing the concept of topology, contributors explore collective memories of Ottoman identity and post-Ottoman state formation in a contemporary epoch that, echoing late modernity, we might term “late nationalism”.

At the turn of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire straddled three continents and encompassed extraordinary ethnic and cultural diversity among the millions of people living within its borders. This text provides a concise history of the late empire between 1789 and 1918, turbulent years marked by incredible social change.

Combines a reinterpretation of the history of the Ottoman Empire in the 17th century with an analysis of the ways history is constructed by its participants.

Introduction: on being Osman -- Discovering Osman: a short history of the text -- A note on translation -- A note on transcription from Ottoman Turkish -- Surrender -- Ransom -- Crime and punishment -- Death and resurrection -- Respite -- Bonds of love -- To the capital -- A friend in need -- An unexpected turn of events -- Trouble on the Danube -- Grifters -- Border run -- The end -- Appendix: main characters in Osman's narrative.