This book focuses on the novel as a literary form that was central to the Ottoman Tanzimat project. Codified outside of the Ottoman space, the novel genre was adopted in the nineteenth-century as a didactic tool to model the new citizens of the Empire. Essays in this book explore the translation of the novel form and its deployment in the late Ottoman cultural context. Authors observe the project of modernity as Tanzimat novelists themselves viewed it, from a variety of disciplinary vantage points (including sociology, political science, urban studies, art history, affect, and the history of the body). Analysing key texts and authors, from the works of Ahmet Midhat Efendi to Mizanci Murad and Vartan Pasha's
Akabi Hikayesi, the book's chapters explore the novel genre as far more than a case of importation of Western and non-Ottoman cultural production, but rather as a vehicle for the cultivation of political subjectivity that drew heavily upon the traditions of the Empire. The book shows that through a synthesis of Ottoman and foreign literary styles, the novels of the Tanzimat represent an important means by which the process of modernization was carried out.
