Unreadable Shores of Love Turkish Modernity and Mystic Romance

When the Ottoman Turkish Empire was divided into modern states after World War I, in Turkey a change of alphabet and radical linguistic reform aimed to free modern Turkish literature from intellectual ties to the East. Holbrook recuperates Ottoman debates on the existential status of language and social value of art with a poetics of Beauty and Love , the philosophical fairy tale in verse by Seyh Galib. Where does language come from? How does a poet conceive imagery? What rights to interpretive authority does Muslim law accord the individual when God' word is law? Holbrook' lively analysis ranges an intertext of genres in Arabic and Persian as well as Turkish. The romance of separated lovers is a paradigm of journeys that lead beyond discourse. A poet' quest for originality reveals an archaeology of modernism. Holbrook traces the revolutionary polemic and Orientalist philology that de-aestheticized Ottoman poetry, bringing the critique of Orientalism to bear upon the Ottoman center Orientalism suppressed.Holbrook, Victoria R. is the author of 'Unreadable Shores of Love Turkish Modernity and Mystic Romance', published 0010 under ISBN 9780292730823 and ISBN 0292730829.