By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, technological breakthroughs in steam travel not only led to the integration of the Ottoman Empire into the world economy but also came to create a vibrant commodity market at home where the Ottoman consumers had gained a better access to a range of cheaper and more reliable goods. The Ottoman state had grown rather anxious to regulate these commodity flows since the 1860s, and often did so by drafting regulations that tried to police the ever-faster travel of goods, ideas, and individuals within and across its borders. The printing press—a commodity limited to the bureaucratic realm at the beginning of the nineteenth century—gradually became more accessible and affordable in the latter part of the nineteenth century as well. This was when it began to form illicit connections and questionable markets, often at the service of ‘suspicious’ political and economic ends, at least in the eyes of the Ottoman bureaucrats. While the existing scholarship has vigorously analyzed the Hamidian practices of censorship, one understudied regulative measure has been the politics that surrounded the print commodity market in general, and that of moveable type in particular. This paper addresses that gap by framing the Hamidian interventions into the Ottoman literary space from the analytic angle of commodities and resources. To do so, I illustrate how the Ottoman state came to regard the printing press as a strategic commodity that required close inspection and surveillance, and examine the attempts of Istanbul to monopolize and centralize the production of moveable type, and regulate its secondhand exchange. It was through such interventions into commodity markets that the Hamidian state tried to regulate the limits of social imagination, and eliminate any alternatives to the official modernity.

In his oft-quoted essay “Methoden des Übersetzens” Friedrich Schleiermacher distinguishes between “mere interpreting” and translation. Yet in the context of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century the two were inextricably bound and they both played seminal roles in expanding the spaces of literature and politics. As a reaction to the Greek Independence movement that began in 1821, some functions of the Dragoman system, hitherto dominated by Greek Phanariots, was taken over by the newly formed Translation Chamber of the Sublime Porte. While the chamber’s activities were mostly limited to interpretation and diplomacy in the beginning, the fact that many of the important Turkish intellectuals of the Late Ottoman Empire were associated with the Translation Chamber exemplifies the unintended and far-reaching cultural consequences of the policies of modernization and centralization. The position of the Translation Chamber in politics and culture also illustrates the increase of the importance of Turkish but the Ottoman Empire of the nineteenth century contained a multitude of communities with different languages and without a strict hierarchy governing these languages and their use. In this sense, the creative ways in which European works of literary prose, poetry and theater were translated and also appropriated/rewritten demonstrate the crucial roles translation has played in brokering translational and multilingual encounters. The repeated translations and adaptations of a singular work in the different languages of the empire, not only most widespread ones such Armenian, Greek and Turkish with the corresponding prevalent scripts but also hybrid forms such as Karamanlidika and Armeno-Turkish, show that the space of language and the agents within weren’t yet fixed. But the circulation of new modern political ideas created a literary space in which different communities experimented with new modes of writing and collaborated with and competed against each other. For example, theatrical performances were prepared and attended by a decidedly cosmopolitan and multilingual body of people and show that how the space of literature became increasingly political in the process of modernization. Tracing the debates surrounding translation and language, this presentation argues that the modernization, expansion and transformation of the Late Ottoman literary space is intertwined with the discussions of cultural and political belonging of different communities of the Empire and how they negotiated somehow contradicting ideologies of citizenship, cosmopolitanism multilingualism and nationalism as modernization efforts introduced new sets of rights and ideas also new senses of belonging.

The dissemination of steam and print technologies in the nineteenth century led to intensified communication, accelerated interaction, and rapid travel. Transformation in technologies of print and travel –such as travel by train, steamboat– as well as the construction of bridges and roads in the modern city led to a changed perception and experience of space. Nineteenth-century Ottoman literature was quick to absorb this changed perception in a rapidly modernizing print culture. Particularly, the leading Ottoman novelist, publicist, and essayist Ahmet Midhat’s (1844-1912) fictional and non-fictional works reflected a prominent spatial and geographical consciousness. I argue that the subjective renderings of space in Midhat’s works channel the ways his readers perceive space by way of a cognitive mapping of the world in narrative. The geographical consciousness that permeates Midhat’s works underpins the relation between the transforming perception of space and the constitution of modern Ottoman identity. ¬ Spatial and geographical consciousness is accompanied by travel in Midhat’s fictional and non-fictional works, such as his essays, novels, and travel books. Travel serves as an effective narrative strategy to flesh out the processes through which an individual finds his or her own place in the world. In this paper, I examine Midhat’s use of travel as a metaphor that unifies material space and metaphorical space for his readers to encounter the unfamiliar by way of vicarious travel. I will conduct a tripartite comparison of Midhat’s three essays: his seminal essay on travel, which was published as a preface to Mehmet Emin’s travel book (1871), his preface to his travel book Sayyadane bir Cevelan (A Hunting Trip) (1890) and his preface to his encyclopedic travel book, Avrupa’da Bir Cevelan (A Tour in Europe) (1891). By close reading the terms and concepts related to travel and spatial consciousness in these three essays, I seek to illustrate travel as the foundation of world making strategies in Midhat’s larger oeuvre.

In 1883, a forty-two years old Armenian woman, Srpuhi Dussap (1841-1901), published the first Ottoman woman novel, Mayda, in Constantinople. Mayda gained attention from intellectuals immediately because of its feminist content and Dussap received a great amount of criticism from male writers, who refuse to see her novel as a representation of Armenian women and society. Dussap was not a new voice in the literary world of Constantinople. She was well known among Armenian intelligentsia. She published several articles about female education, emancipation and employment before she published Mayda, she hosted salon intellectual meetings with her French musician husband, and she was the head of the School Loving Armenian Women’s Association. I claim that Dussap’s occupying male dominated literary sphere with the choice of epistolary novel was her deliberate intention. She was influenced by romantic writers such as Victor Hugo, George Sand, Milton, Byron and Schiller and the epistolary novels of women writers, who had used this genre to assert the impossibility of saying what women feel since 18th century. In this paper, first, I analyze how she produced distinctly political, intimate and disruptive space to talk about the issues such as sexuality, feminine desire, partner choice and the natural world harmony of the sexes by using the letters of two close female friends. Then, I examine how she challenged the previous presentation of women image in the literary space of male writers by confessing secretive emotions of women, and presenting a new woman image, which was becoming more accepted within the modernized social sphere of the Empire. Finally, I will re-visit the impact of her work on the literary space during that time by discussing how male critics defended their old-fashioned discourses on gender, sexuality and identity of women. Additionally, I believe that Ottoman literary historiography in general has falsely viewed the variety of languages in the Empire as a barrier to textual transmission between its different ethnic groups, and failed to capture the multiplicity of Ottoman linguistic sources. By overcoming the traditional approaches towards Ottoman women's literature and linguistic difficulties, I suggest that Dussap was an Ottoman woman novelist, who voiced her sexual difference within the male dominated literary sphere for the first time and inspired the following generation. Note:The first Ottoman-Turkish woman novelist Fatma Aliye published her first novel Muhâderât (Virtuous Ladies) in 1892.