Staging the Ottoman Turk

2016-10-11 Literary Criticism

Author : Esin Akalin
Release : 2016-10-11
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 195/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Staging the Ottoman Turk by : Esin Akalin

Download or read book Staging the Ottoman Turk written by Esin Akalin. This book was released on 2016-10-11. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of the fear that gripped Europe after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, English dramatists, like their continental counterparts, began representing the Ottoman Turks in plays inspired by historical events. The Ottoman milieu as a dramatic setting provided English audiences with a common experience of fascination and fear of the Other. The stereotyping of the Turks in these plays—revolving around complex themes such as tyranny, captivity, war, and conquests—arose from their perception of Islam. The Ottomans' failure in the second siege of Vienna in 1683 led to the reversal of trends in the representation of the Turks on stage. As the ascending strength of a web of European alliances began to check Ottoman expansion, what then began to dazzle the aesthetic imagination of eighteenth century England was the sultan's seraglio with images of extravaganza and decadence. In this book, Esin Akalin draws upon a selective range of seventeenth and eighteenth century plays to reach an understanding, both from a non-European perspective and Western standpoint, how one culture represents the other through discourse, historiography, and drama. The book explores a cluster of issues revolving around identity and difference in terms of history, ideology, and the politics of representation. In contextualizing political, cultural, and intellectual roots in the ideology of representing the Ottoman/Muslim as the West’s Other, the author tackles with the questions of how history serves literature and to what extent literature creates history.

The Singing Turk

2016-08-30 History

Author : Larry Wolff
Release : 2016-08-30
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 652/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Singing Turk by : Larry Wolff

Download or read book The Singing Turk written by Larry Wolff. This book was released on 2016-08-30. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While European powers were at war with the Ottoman Empire for much of the eighteenth century, European opera houses were staging operas featuring singing sultans and pashas surrounded by their musical courts and harems. Mozart wrote The Abduction from the Seraglio. Rossini created a series of works, including The Italian Girl in Algiers. And these are only the best known of a vast repertory. This book explores how these representations of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, the great nemesis of Christian Europe, became so popular in the opera house and what they illustrate about European–Ottoman international relations. After Christian armies defeated the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683, the Turks no longer seemed as threatening. Europeans increasingly understood that Turkish issues were also European issues, and the political absolutism of the sultan in Istanbul was relevant for thinking about politics in Europe, from the reign of Louis XIV to the age of Napoleon. While Christian European composers and publics recognized that Muslim Turks were, to some degree, different from themselves, this difference was sometimes seen as a matter of exotic costume and setting. The singing Turks of the stage expressed strong political perspectives and human emotions that European audiences could recognize as their own.

The Taming of the Turk

2013-07-03 Music

Author : Bent Holm
Release : 2013-07-03
Genre : Music
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 200/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Taming of the Turk by : Bent Holm

Download or read book The Taming of the Turk written by Bent Holm. This book was released on 2013-07-03. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries the figure of ‘the Turk’ spread fascination and fear - in the theatre of war and on the theatrical stage. On the one hand, ‘the Turk’ represented a spectacular dimension, an imaginary world of pirates, sultans and odalisques; on the other hand, he stood for the actual Ottoman Empire, engaged in long-lasting confrontations and exchanges with Occidental powers. When confronted with historical circumstances - military, commercial and religious - the cliché image of ‘the Turk’ dissolves in complex combinations of potential references. The Taming of the Turk: Ottomans on the Danish Stage 1596-1896 elucidates, for the first time, three centuries of cultural history as articulated in dealings between the Kingdom of Denmark and the Ottoman Empire seen in a general European context. From the staging of ‘the Turk’ as a diabolical player in royal ceremonies of early modern times, to the appearance of harmless ‘Turkish’ entertainment figures in the late nineteenth century. Artistic, theatrical and theological conceptions co-act in paradoxical ways against a backdrop of pragmatic connections with the Ottomans. The story of this long-forgotten connection between a small northern-European nation and a mighty Oriental empire is based on a source material - plays, paintings, treaties, travelogues etc. - that has hitherto chiefly been neglected, although it played a significant role in earlier times. The images of ‘exotic’ figures sometimes even turn out to be self-images. The documents hold the keys to a number of mental and fundamental (pre)conditions, and thus even to imagery constructions of our day.

Discovering Self and Other, Representations of Ottoman Turks in English Drama (1656-1792).

2001

Author : Esin Akalin
Release : 2001
Genre :
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : /5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Discovering Self and Other, Representations of Ottoman Turks in English Drama (1656-1792). by : Esin Akalin

Download or read book Discovering Self and Other, Representations of Ottoman Turks in English Drama (1656-1792). written by Esin Akalin. This book was released on 2001. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout history, cultural encounters between the East and the West have led to attempts to struggle with the relations between Self and Other. It is a commonplace that dramatic events such as the fall of Constantinople (renamed Istanbul), the first siege of Vienna in 1529 and the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 generated a widespread and an ongoing interest in the Ottomans as the West's Other. The presence of the Ottomans in the Mediterranean and the extension of Ottoman rule over large parts of South-Eastern Europe and North Africa deeply affected Westerners politically and culturally. Renaissance curiosity and anxiety about the Ottoman Turks led to an outpouring of texts conveying ideas and knowledge about the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922) whose power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries extended even as far as the English channel. In the sixteenth century, English dramatists joined most continental artists (literary and visual) in representing the Ottoman Turks on stage through a fascination that oscillated between fear and emulation. My purpose in this thesis is to shed some light on the politics and strategies of European representations by contextualizing and analyzing the practices of representing the Ottoman/Muslim on stage as the West's Other. My premise is that without a historical perspective, the meaning of texts written about the Ottomans remains obscure, and their contemporary allusions lost. The thesis focuses on the representations of the Ottoman Turks in seventeenth and eighteenth-century drama, mainly English. It addresses the relationship between text/history, knowledge/power, Other/Self in order to develop a methodology specific to representations of the Ottoman Turks, a nation usually ignored by such theoretical constructs as Orientalism. And it analyzes the plays historically and ideologically, to reopen/reexamine English understandings of and attitudes towards the Turks.

Turks, Repertories, and the Early Modern English Stage

2018-02-01 Literary Criticism

Author : Mark Hutchings
Release : 2018-02-01
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 639/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Turks, Repertories, and the Early Modern English Stage by : Mark Hutchings

Download or read book Turks, Repertories, and the Early Modern English Stage written by Mark Hutchings. This book was released on 2018-02-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers the relationship between the vogue for putting the Ottoman Empire on the English stage and the repertory system that underpinned London playmaking. The sheer visibility of 'the Turk' in plays staged between 1567 and 1642 has tended to be interpreted as registering English attitudes to Islam, as articulating popular perceptions of Anglo-Ottoman relations, and as part of a broader interest in the wider world brought home by travellers, writers, adventurers, merchants, and diplomats. Such reports furnished playwrights with raw material which, fashioned into drama, established ‘the Turk’ as a fixture in the playhouse. But it was the demand for plays to replenish company repertories to attract London audiences that underpinned playmaking in this period. Thus this remarkable fascination for the Ottoman Empire is best understood as a product of theatre economics and the repertory system, rather than taken directly as a measure of cultural and historical engagement.

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Staging the Ottoman Turk

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Discovering Self and Other, Representations of Ottoman Turks in English Drama (1656-1792).

Turks, Repertories, and the Early Modern English Stage

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