Ориентализмът и грешките на младостта: въздействието на популярната литература в творчеството на Ахмед Мидхат Ефенди и Васил Друмев
Orientalism and the Mistakes of the Young Age: The Impact of Popular Literature on the Works of Ahmet Midhat Efendi and Vasil Drumev

Summary/Abstract: This article is a comparative study on several levels. First, it examines the theoretical interrelatedness between negotiable concepts such as orientalism, world literature and comparativism. The study is not designed as an ambitious endeavor of a fully theoretical nature; it rather stays closer to the case studies from a certain historical period – the 1860–1890 in the Ottoman empire. On that second level, the article takes into consideration whether such a constellation of concepts would be applicable when a comparison of two authors from different nationalities in entailed. They are the Ottoman-Turkish author Ahmet Midhat Efendi and the Bulgarian writer Vasil Drumev. After an overview of their biography and impact on Turkish and Bulgarian culture respectively, my comparative analysis continues with seeking convergences in the realm of the authors’ recollections of their early years of literary activity. It seems that they have been familiar with similar lists of Western European literary works and have developed very similar approaches of adapting orientalism and of overcoming the vogue for Western popular literature in the 19th c.

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