Spectral Empire: Anglo-Ottoman Poetics of Sovereignty

Camoglu, Arif

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-zeg2-8c59

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Spectral Empire: Anglo-Ottoman Poetics of Sovereignty

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This dissertation argues that British and Ottoman literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are linked and mutually informed in their representations of sovereignty. My study of the poetry, fiction, chronicles and travelogues from these periods demonstrates that both literary traditions respond to the rivalry between the British and Ottoman empires by envisioning imperial hegemony in an obscure form that transcends the limitations of time and space, such as an “influential spirit,” “shadow of power,” or “powerful radiance.” This project blends physical and digital archival research and literary historicism with critical theory, recruiting insight from Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Gayatri C. Spivak, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, to examine the figurative but forceful manifestations of empire. Through its analyses of the poems of John Keats and Şeyh Galib, fictions of Mary Shelley and Giritli Aziz Efendi, historical writings of Edward Gibbon and Abdülhak Molla, and travelogues of William Leake and Ömer Lütfi, among many other better-known and understudied authors, this dissertation renders traceable how imperial sovereignty sustains itself outside its historical-material dimension, and in doing so, it re-conceptualizes empire in global Anglophone literary studies. As it shifts the critical perspective on British literary depictions of imperial sovereignty by juxtaposing these depictions with their contemporary Ottoman accounts for the first time, this project expands the critique of empire beyond its US-Eurocentric contexts by introducing Ottoman sources to post-colonial debates on imperialism.

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