Modern Turkish literary biography: A study of Beşir Fuat’s biographies of Victor Hugo and Voltaire

Abstract

The nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire is an exciting and revolutionary period for researchers working on this era and it was a turbulent, revolutionary, and giddy time for its residents. The same is true for biographical studies. While classical genres such as tabaqat, tadhkirah, and tarjama-i hal thrived in this period, works that are similar to today’s current concept of biography began to be formed by the works of writers like Ahmet Mithat, Beşir Fuat, and Fatma Aliye. The general judgement of these works is that they are “examples of biographies deviated from the traditional genre but nevertheless failed to be properly modern.” This thesis attempts to demonstrate the weaknesses of this statement through an examination of Beşir Fuat’s biographies of Victor Hugo and Voltaire and argues against claims that nineteenth century Ottoman biographical writing has much more complicated literary conventions than the two-dimensional models of traditional-modern, progressive regressive, and Western-Eastern. It compares Beşir Fuat’s biographies, with contemporaneous Turkish biographies alongside the “Western” and traditional genres. Contrary to the approach that weighs these works to determine which one is more “Westernized,” it treats them with different parameters such as the daimon of their authors, textual reflections of their political agendas, generic dynamics of biography, intertextuality, speech genres, and the social position of the biographer and biographical subjects.