This paper problematizes the process of naming edebiyat (literature) as such to offer a new comparative study of literary modernity. Bringing together examples of criticism that question the scope, function, and effect of edebiyat as it emerges in comparison with and translation of the French term littérature in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, this paper argues that the institutionalization of literature as an autonomous discipline different from moral philosophy and science is a shared problematic that characterizes literary modernity across languages. Thereby, it challenges conventional narratives which position the Western (French in this case) epistemic domain as the supreme referent of modernity and read Ottoman literary and non-literary reforms in the nineteenth century in terms of subjectivity and representation. For Ottoman literati, this process involves negotiating the inheritance of edeb with its close ties to morality and learning as loosely defined in a trilingual and undivided Islamic literary geography. Under the rubric of Edebiyat-? Osmaniye (Ottoman Literature), the new way of literary world-making progressively detached itself from moral teaching and its ultimate divine referent, appertained more to questions of language, aesthetics, and genre, and differentiated between Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish. Moreover, the definition of new literature required demarcating a literary history that de-Islamicized the Arabo-Persian legacy in a universalized transnational literary genealogy, naturalizing constant exchange and transaction between languages, justifying heightened interactions with French texts in the nineteenth century, and securing a place for Ottoman literature within the worldwide literary relationality. To that purpose, my reading unpacks the semantic, moral, and genealogical content of edebiyat through three stages. It traces edebiyat as permutated from moral instruction in Nam?k Kemal, through scientific exposition in Be?ir Fuad, to aesthetic pleasure in Cenab ?ehabettin. As such, in effectuating the distinctions that play out in tension between the literary and the non-literary, the old and the new, the religious and the secular, the particular and the universal, the instantiation of edebiyat reminds us that the very break between old and new regimes of knowledge was not natural or neutral.