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The rich but often neglected field of Turkish and Ottoman literature has long suffered from the fact that a number of traditional research boundaries have separated the studies of folk and elite literature, of Ottoman and modern literature, of the village and the city, the religious and the secular.
Intersections in Turkish Literature is a collection of essays on Turkish literature by former students of James Stewart-Robinson. The topics and methods cover a broad range--from a careful thematic analysis of a traditional Turkish folktale, which reveals its resemblance to well-known Western tales; to an analysis of the "saint tales" recounted by present-day Albanian Bektasi adepts; to a study of narrative rhythm in Nazim Hikhmet's rendition of an account of a fifteenth-century popular uprising.
Walter G. Andrews has assembled the writings of a number of scholars who bridge traditional chasms, inviting us to rethink our approaches to the study of Turkish and Ottoman literature. This collection forms a nucleus that clearly demonstrates the great potential now existing for study in this area, the essays displaying a variety of unusual approaches that bring together seemingly disparate materials: the Turkish story "The Pomegranate Seed" and Disney's "Snow White"; a fifteenth-century chronicle and the poetry of a modern socialist poet; Albanian dervishes in Detroit; a modern Turkish novel; Virginia Woolf; a Yale critic; traditional Japanese poetry; and Ottoman lyrics.
Intersections in Turkish Literature will provide an important stimulus to work that reaches beyond the limits of area studies, intersecting with the interests of scholars and students of literary theory, folklore studies, anthropology, French, Japanese, and Persian.
Walter G. Andrews is Affiliate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, University of Washington.

The Age of Beloveds offers a rich introduction to early modern Ottoman culture through a study of its beautiful lyric love poetry. At the same time, it suggests provocative cross-cultural parallels in the sociology and spirituality of love in Europe—from Istanbul to London—during the long sixteenth century. Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakli provide a generous sampling of translations of Ottoman poems, many of which have never appeared in English, along with informative and inspired close readings. The authors explain that the flourishing of Ottoman power and culture during the “Turkish Renaissance” manifested itself, to some degree, as an “age of beloveds,” in which young men became the focal points for the desire and attention of powerful officeholders and artists as well as the inspiration for a rich literature of love.

The authors show that the “age of beloveds” was not just an Ottoman, eastern European, or Islamic phenomenon. It extended into western Europe as well, pervading the cultures of Venice, Florence, Rome, and London during the same period. Andrews and Kalpakli contend that in an age dominated by absolute rulers and troubled by war, cultural change, and religious upheaval, the attachments of dependent courtiers and the longings of anxious commoners aroused an intense interest in love and the beloved. The Age of Beloveds reveals new commonalities in the cultural history of two worlds long seen as radically different.