View All Book Series

Life Narratives of the Ottoman Realm: Individual and Empire in the Near East

About the Book Series

As a consequence of the political developments following World War I, the Ottoman Empire has been treated by a great number of historians above all as an intrinsic part of Turkish national history. Although the academic community has recognized that the Ottoman Empire was, in fact, multiethnic and multicultural, this recognition has too rarely been translated into scholarly practice. This is due in large part to the fragmentation of Ottoman studies into various academic disciplines that only infrequently communicate with one another: as examples, Turkish-language literature predominantly produced by Muslims is treated by Turkish Literature experts and Turkologists in the West; Ottoman Ladino literature falls within the purview of Romance studies; the empire’s Greeks are studied within the field of Byzantine and Hellenic studies; and so on.

This publication series aims to bring all of these perspectives together in a historically specific and responsible way by providing a key publication platform for scholars aiming to study the narrative sources of a vast geographic region, stretching, at times, from Bosnia to the Yemen, in its full complexity as a multilingual and multiethnic Empire.

For further information about the series please contact Michael Greenwood at [email protected]

 

3 Series Titles


Narrating the Dragoman’s Self in the Veneto-Ottoman Balkans, c. 1550–1650

Narrating the Dragoman’s Self in the Veneto-Ottoman Balkans, c. 1550–1650

1st Edition

By Stefan Hanß
November 28, 2024

This microhistory of the Salvagos—an Istanbul family of Venetian interpreters and spies travelling the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mediterranean—is a remarkable feat of the historian’s craft of storytelling. With his father having been killed by secret order of Venice and his nephew to be ...

Istanbul - Kushta - Constantinople Narratives of Identity in the Ottoman Capital, 1830-1930

Istanbul - Kushta - Constantinople: Narratives of Identity in the Ottoman Capital, 1830-1930

1st Edition

Edited By Christoph Herzog, Richard Wittmann
June 30, 2020

Istanbul – Kushta – Constantinople presents twelve studies that draw on contemporary life narratives that shed light on little explored aspects of nineteenth-century Ottoman Istanbul. As a broad category of personal writing that goes beyond the traditional confines of the autobiography, life ...

Depicting the Late Ottoman Empire in Turkish Autobiographies Images of a Past World

Depicting the Late Ottoman Empire in Turkish Autobiographies: Images of a Past World

1st Edition

By Philipp Wirtz
December 12, 2019

The period between the 1880s and the 1920s was a time of momentous changes in the Ottoman Empire. It was also an age of literary experiments, of which autobiography forms a part. This book analyses Turkish autobiographical narratives describing the part of their authors’ lives that was spent while ...

AJAX loader