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Abstract:
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Throughout history, culturd encounters between the East and the West
have led to attempts to struggle with the relations between Self and Other. It is
a cornmonplace that dramatic events such as the fail of Constantinople
(renamed Istanbul), the 6rst siege of Vienna in 1529 and the BattIe 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 ruie 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)w hose
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 histoncal 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, mainiy 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 pIays
historicaliy and ideologicaily, to reopenfreexamine English understandings of and attitudes towards the Turks. |