Istanbul - Kushta - Constantinople: Narratives of Identity in the Ottoman Capital, 1830-1930

ISBN-13: 9781138631311 / Angielski / Twarda / 2018 / 312 str.

Christoph Herzog; Richard Wittmann

Opis

The book introduces the reader to the wealth of narrative sources on late Ottoman Istanbul's diverse population by drawing on the voices of its permanent residents and foreign visitors. It juxtaposes a selection of unpublished and/or neglected life narratives to the prevailing national historiographies and creates a tapestry of diverse perceptions of life in the Ottoman capital formed from various angles, gender perspectives and social backgrounds. Even though narrative sources have lately been recognized as legitimate heuristic tools for the writing of history, this "biographic turn" has not yet found its expression in the textbooks and other publications. Recent works in history have begun to present narrative sources in a single source language each, usually in Ottoman-Turkish as the language of the state elites. The present volume, however, takes this strand a step further by covering narrative primary sources in almost a dozen languages. By introducing and discussing these sources in English this publication will make many of these sources available to a wider academic readership for the first time and help recreate late Ottoman realities in the multi-ethnic capital Istanbul through the inclusion of the personal writings of male and female individuals belonging to the three monotheistic religions.