Istanbul 1940 and Global Modernity : The World According to Auerbach, Tanpinar, and Edib

This book revisits Erich Auerbach’s Istanbul writings as pioneering works of contemporary literary history and cultural criticism. It interprets these writings, which center around Western literary cultures, against the background of Auerbach’s Turkish colleagues’ works that trace Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural histories.

Istanbul 1940 and Global Modernity: The World According to Auerbach, Tanpınar, and Edib engages Erich Auerbach’s Istanbul career and his pioneering works of comparative literature in a new light. It interprets Auerbach’s works against the background of his Turkish colleagues’ analogous works that, like Auerbach’s masterpieces, were drafted at Istanbul University in the 1940s. Unlike Auerbach’s writings, which center around Western literary cultures and Christianity, these Turkish writings trace non-Western, largely Islamicate cultural histories. The critic, novelist, and poet Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–1962) and his illustrious senior, the Muslim feminist, humanist, and novelist Halide Edib (1884–1964) focused on Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural trajectories. In addition to offering groundbreaking insights into their respective cultural legacies, Auerbach, Tanpınar, and Edib elaborated extensively on the intercrossing that is their meeting place, the chiasmic space of modern literature. Interpreting their writings as the work of a collective, Istanbul 1940 and Global Modernity examines the new paths these critics opened for theorizing literary modernity, world literature, and the comparative study of literature and religion.