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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.
DIVExamines the "golden age" of the culture of the Ottoman empire in the 16th century, exploring sexuality, gender and literary society, as well as the demographics, economics, politics, society of love and other cultural productions of the Ottoman/div
I've Learned Some Things allows English-language readers the rare opportunity to experience the work of Ataol Behramoğlu, one of Turkey's most celebrated poets. The sixty-six poems in this collection span the author's extraordinary career and are stunning examples of the intense emotional quality of his work. Behramoğlu celebrates the rich fabric of everyday life by exploring both personal and social struggles, sometimes employing a whimsical tone. Walter G. Andrews's skillful translation conveys the vibrancy of Behramoğlu's work to an English-language audience, and this bilingual edition allows Turkish-language readers to follow the original text.
In the space of six years early in the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire underwent such turmoil and trauma—the assassination of the young ruler Osman II, the re-enthronement and subsequent abdication of his mad uncle Mustafa I, for a start—that a scholar pronounced the period's three-day-long dramatic climax "an Ottoman Tragedy." Under Gabriel Piterberg's deft analysis, this period of crisis becomes a historical laboratory for the history of the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century—an opportunity to observe the dialectical play between history as an occurrence and experience and history as a recounting of that experience. Piterberg reconstructs the Ottoman narration of this ...
In the twelfth century, the Catholic Church attempted a thoroughgoing reform of marriage and sexual behavior aimed at eradicating sexual desire from Christian lives. Seeking a refuge from the very serious condemnations of the Church and relying on a courtly culture that was already preoccupied with honor and secrecy, European poets, romance writers, and lovers devised a vision of love as something quite different from desire. Romantic love was thus born as a movement of covert resistance. In The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, William M. Reddy illuminates the birth of a cultural movement that managed to regulate selfish desire and render it in...