Marifet :|an Ottoman-French literary periodical in the Ottoman press at the fin de siècle

Abstract

The primary purpose of this research is to introduce the weekly literary journal Marifet, published in French and Ottoman-Turkish between January 9, 1898 and September 8, 1898 and directed by Théodossia Sophroniades, to literary circles. Théodossia Sophroniades, an Ottoman-Greek intellectual woman of Istanbul, was the licensee, directress, and editor in chief of Marifet. Théodossia Sophroniades was the first woman to claim and obtain a license for a journal to be published in the Ottoman press. In this thesis, I will investigate why, how, and in what manner the authors of Marifet, whose Ottoman and French issues I have translated into Turkish, tried to bring innovation to Ottoman literature at the end of the nineteenth century. I put forth the idea of an Ottoman culture which already had the potential to rise to the level of European civilization in social and cultural terms was the backbone of Marifet’s editorial policy. I evaluate Marifet, supported and supervised by those in power and the bureaucracy, as a systematic modernization project to show how “the West” should be appropriated at the fin de siècle. I examine women’s issues, particularly in the French part of the Journal, based primarily on the modern image of women in Théodossia Sophroniades’ literary stories, which until now have been overlooked. I demonstrate how many modernity-driven texts a non-Muslim woman in the Ottoman Empire was able to produce using female characters that transcend the culture into which she was born. (See Appendix A for an extended abstract.)