An analysis of the terminology of textual production methods in sixteenth-century Ottoman şair tezkires

Abstract

Şair tezkires (tezkiretü’ş-şu‘arâ) or biographical dictionaries of poets are regarded as the most prominent literary/historical sources of Ottoman literature. Originated in the Arabic and remodeled in the Persian tradition, şair tezkires emerged in the sixteenth century as a separate literary genre in the Ottoman realm and continued up until the twentieth century unceasingly. Tezkires not only provide us with the basic background information about a poet’s life and his/her poesy/poetics, but they also give samples of their poems, hence displaying a mixture of the two genres, biography and anthology. This thesis is based upon and derives from sixteenth-century şair tezkires written in the Ottoman literary domain. In this study, methods of textual production are the main focus of interest in the context of those tezkires. There have been various definitions and classifications of the works produced in the Ottoman literature. Yet based on a different type of evaluation, this study pursues a different kind of classification and focuses on how the works/texts were composed; that is, the terms that indicate the ways, methods of textual production which could be listed as tetebbu‘, nazîre, cevâb, terceme, şerh, tasnîf, te’lîf, tazmîn and so on are discussed in detail, and all the usages of these terms by the sixteenth-century tezkire authors are presented with their intra-lingual translations. Thus, this thesis has put forth both a study of terminology and a discourse analysis.