How to Turn Turk?
How to Turn Turk?

Summary/Abstract: The ways in which the fear of the “Grand Turk” and the accompanying threat of “turning Turk” shaped European culture have been exhaustively studied from literary and historical perspectives. Yet the question of the content and the particularity of the threat, i.e. what exactly it entails to turn Turk, has hardly inspired critical insight. This paper engages this content and the particularity and offers a general outline for a history of literary culture with the question of turning Turk at the center. The outline begins with Don Quixote and culminates in three contemporary and exemplary figures: the modern day “Sabbataian”; novelist John Buchan’s “Greenmantle” from his 1916 novel of the same name; and Turkish humanist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s “dervish without the mantle”.

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