Dissatisfied and frustrated with the censorship regimen established by the Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II, Halid Ziya (U?akl?gil) (1867-1945), a well-canonized litterateur of the late-Ottoman Empire, wrote a novel, titled Mai ve Siyah (Blue and Black, 1897), depicting the life of a young man who strives to be a successful poet but fails miserably in the end, both in his career and personal life. The protagonist's failure, stemming from his unsympathetic surroundings rather than his own incompetence, constitutes a channel for Halid Ziya to express, in very implicit terms, his discontent with the tight control of the press and with the predominance of outdated literary values. The writing of this particular novel was, in fact, such an insatiable urge for its author that it “deprived [him] of tranquility, with an absolute necessity to be born.” (from H.Z.'s memoirs) Following its serialized publication in the Servet-i Fünun (The Wealth of Knowledge) journal, the self-censoring author managed to escape the keen eyes of government censorship. Yet Mai ve Siyah became part of a wave of heated discussion on the directions that literature (and poetry, in particular) should take in relation to the impact of the West and to the local literary heritage. The novel was criticized in terms of both its gloomy representation of the literary sphere of its time, and for its subscription to a highly elitist narrative language. The “dekadanlar” (decadents) controversy, named after an accusation directed by the famous Ahmed Midhat Efendi at the Servet-i Fünun writers and poets, the discussion seems to have divided litterateurs and intellectuals into opposing camps. In this presentation, I will analyze the literary field in the Ottoman capital during the last decade of the nineteenth century, which Mai ve Siyah both was generated within, and takes as its subject. The term “literary field,” coined by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, allows literary scholars to incorporate social, economic, political and other historically significant factors into their analyses, without lapsing into the reductionism of a “historian's approach” towards literature. Having a novel as the starting point for such an attempt to overcome the disciplinary divide will, in fact, not only prevent an often-seen isolation of the literary work from the environment of its production but it will also caution historians against a crude interpretation of fiction as a mirror of reality.