The Author Who Invented His Own Modernism: Reading Ahmet Mithat Efendi Through Novel Prefaces in the Context of Ottoman Modernization

Abstract

It seems highly essential to discuss 19th-century Ottoman literature in the context of modernization in order to make sense of the cultural transformation of the empire. The anxiety of modernization, which spread all over the empire, found its place in the establishment of the literary understanding of the time as well. Ahmet Mithat Efendi (1844-1912) is one of the main sources that enables a fertile discussion of the empire’s understanding of modern literature in the 19th century. As a highly productive writer who dominated the literature market of the period, it is a necessity rather than a choice to discuss him. The aim of this article is to focus on the prefaces of three of Ahmet Mithat Efendi’s novels and to discuss how he, both as a writer and as a Muslim-Ottoman individual, designed a modern consciousness and identity for the empire and its inherent elements. In this way, it is possible to notice the motives of both his literary understanding of modernism as a writer figure and the perception of modernity in the empire in the 19th century. I claim that Ahmet Mithat Efendi reformulated (or had to reformulate) the concepts of modernity and modernism over again in his different novel prefaces and designed a flexible and multidimensional modernization.