George Lukacs and Mikael Bakhtin, two of the most influential novel theorists, provide rubrics through fleshing out what the novel is not in their treatments of the epic and the poem. The press seems to be another competing novelistic discourse, with the novel always aware of and looking towards the newspaper. In recent years, we have come to know a lot about 19th century Ottoman-Lebanese Ahmed Fares el-Shidyāq (d. 1887) as an iconoclast “novelist” whose literary outpouring is polymathic in scope, in part thanks to Humphrey Davies translation of Al-Sāqʿalā al-Sāq (2013). Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to Shidyāq’s latter stages of life, the journalist publishing the largest Arabic newspaper (al-Jawā’ib) from the Ottoman imperial capital for over two decades (1861-1884). The first part of this paper provides a brief review of the scholarship on this figure. It first looks at the Anglophone literature that has overwhelmingly focused on Shidyāq’s earlier stages of his life, relating to postcolonialism, the global novel and modernity. Meanwhile, Arabic language studies of recent decades that have tackled Shidyāq’s latter stage of his life have focused exclusively on the newspaper through the lens of lexicography and intellectual biography. This paper proposes looking at the newspaper through Bakhtinian novelistic theory. It turns to briefly examine the representation of journalism in Leg over Leg before pivoting to a close reading of an issue of al-Jawā’ib. As I argue, al-Jawā’ib reveals a hybridity of the monologic and the polyphonic. Its addressees are less clear than the poem, but clearer than the ambiguous receiver of the novel. Modeled on other newspapers, the press becomes the modernizing vehicle that allows Shidyāq to continue expressing the heteroglossia of the social world while also profiting from its function. He is not as free and language is not as polyphonic as it is in his seminal novel Al-Sāqʿalā al-Sāq, but the ways in which he negotiates running an Empire-sponsored newspaper at a time of incredible censorship and multi-patronage are incredibly artful and complex, challenging prior understandings of Shidyāq and giving us a more complete image of his life. Above all, this paper contributes to a reassessment of Arab modernity (the Nahḍa) that bridges the often-divided fields of Ottoman-Turkish and Ottoman-Arabic studies, bringing the imperial capital to the center of the story for late 19th century Arab-Ottoman intellectual life rather than focusing solely on the Arab provinces or on exilic Europe.

This paper takes off from the premise that the literary canon of Nahḍa has been beholden to a cartographic imaginary that reads literary form as a site indexing the encounter between Europe and its others. This limited geographic compartmentalization has undermined our ability to read literary form as a site for the practice, and production, of conceptions of the literary. This paper returns to the usual suspects of 19th century literature in Arabic to examine questions of formal coherence and narrative epistemology beyond the cartographic imaginary of modernity. Following the threads of the conception of the imagination as “spectrality” (khayāl) across instances from this canon, the paper argues that far from being a fragmented form, mixing traditional and modern, Arabic and European, literary form in Nahḍa is born out of arduous reckoning with modern political sovereignty. The insight allows us to implode the temporal assumptions underpinning canonicity which are another refraction of the cartographic imaginary. In so doing, a new horizon for serious comparison is opened up.

As Esther-Miriam Wagner (2021), Ghayde Ghraowi (2022) and Hacı Osman Gündüz (2022) have observed, the past few years have witnessed a rise in the field of Ottoman Arabic literature. While this scholarship has mainly focused on Arabic works produced within the Ottoman Empire, this paper sheds light upon the reception of pre-Ottoman Arabic works in the Ottoman context. In particular, it analyses Hacı İbrahim’s (1826–88) articles on Arabic language and literature in various Ottoman newspapers, such as Tarık, Vakit, and Tercüman-ı Hakikat. Hacı İbrahim has been studied as a ‘conservative’ author because he criticised Tanzimat modernisation and constantly praised Arabic language and literature. At the same time, he advocated ‘modern’ views. For example, he emphasised that Ottomans should not merely understand Arabic works; they, unlike early modern Ottoman authors, should also translate them into Turkish. Furthermore, Hacı İbrahim believed that there was no difference between Arabic and Ottoman literatures; in fact, an anonymous author who shared his key beliefs also claimed in the 162th issue of the newspaper Malumat that ‘Ottoman literature means Arabic literature’. Hacı İbrahim claimed that al-Mutanabbī (d. 965) was part of an Ottoman’s ‘natural diet’, as he responded against an anonymous author who claimed in Tercüman-ı Hakikat that it was not natural for an Ottoman reader to read al-Mutanabbī’s works, which were seen as ‘roasted chickpeas made of iron’ that ‘may break one’s teeth’. While Hacı İbrahim has defended the need for Ottomans to learn and read Arabic, his articles very rarely, if ever, make references to ‘Ottoman Arabic works’. As this paper will show, when late Ottoman Turkish works, such as Hacı İbrahim’s articles, discuss Arabic literature, they tend to draw more on pre-Ottoman works such as Imruʾ al-Qays’s (d. c. 550) Muʿallaqa ode than on nahḍa writings. Rather than studying pre-modern Arabic works within the context of their source culture, the paper sheds light upon the ‘afterlife’, i.e., new receptions and interpretations, that pre-modern Arabic works attained in the Ottoman context. It claims that pre-Ottoman Arabic works also constituted an integral component of the multilingual Ottoman canon, which excluded many Ottoman Arabic works. Finally, the paper posits that the tendency to view Ottoman literature as Arabic literature in late Ottoman works prepared the ground for later literary histories, which studied Ottoman literature as Turkish literature and hence overlooked other linguistic traditions that constituted the Ottoman canon.