The Last of an Age

Focusing on the work and reception of the Ottoman poet Zati (1477-1546) during his lifetime and in the decades after, this study explores a time when literature written in Turkish rapidly grew in parallel with an expanding bureaucratic state. It situates the changing reception of Zati within the context of a shift in critical attitudes toward the

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In The Last of an Age, Sooyong Kim explores the relationship between



social change and the development of an Ottoman literary canon in the



course of the sixteenth century by examining the work and reception of



a popular poet, Zati (1471–1546). Kim argues that a newly emergent



group of bureaucratic literati, through the production of authoritative biographical



dictionaries, ultimately relegated Zati to a lesser literary age,



driven by a self-fashioning that privileged broad linguistic ability, above



all else, with poetry serving as the main vehicle for demonstrating that.



This study is interdisciplinary in approach, taking insights from literary



studies, cultural history, and social theory. It adds to the scholarship



on the rise of early modern Ottoman canons in the fields of visual arts



and music and complements recent work on court patronage. Framed by



ongoing critiques of canon formation among specialists of early modern



Europe and late imperial China, the study offers a comparative perspective



on those issues.