The Last of an Age: The Making and Unmaking of a Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Poet

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, abo...