The Last of an Age

Download or read book The Last of an Age written by Sooyong Kim and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Last of an Age, Sooyong Kim explores the relationship between social change and the development of an Ottoman literary canon in the course of the sixteenth century by examining the work and reception of a popular poet, Zati (1471–1546). Kim argues that a newly emergent group of bureaucratic literati, through the production of authoritative biographical dictionaries, ultimately relegated Zati to a lesser literary age, driven by a self-fashioning that privileged broad linguistic ability, above all else, with poetry serving as the main vehicle for demonstrating that. This study is interdisciplinary in approach, taking insights from literary studies, cultural history, and social theory. It adds to the scholarship on the rise of early modern Ottoman canons in the fields of visual arts and music and complements recent work on court patronage. Framed by ongoing critiques of canon formation among specialists of early modern Europe and late imperial China, the study offers a comparative perspective on those issues.