Ethical Antinomies

Abstract Building on recent scholarship on the novel and Middle Eastern modernities, this article examines how Ottoman intellectuals theorized the novel as a realist genre in the nineteenth century as a way of including Ottoman literary knowledge within global novel theories. In the late Ottoman context, the novel was articulated in terms of conceptual separations (primarily as truth/imitation–fiction/creation, which then develops into nature-beauty and romance-realism binaries). Such conceptual divides inform both the history and the theory of the novel by Ottoman intellectuals. Revisiting the problem of realism in light of the dialectics that these divides built up, this article argues that they dialogically establish realism as a symbiotic regime of representation that merges mimeticism and transcendentalism, which had aesthetic as well as political implications. More importantly, negotiating the tension between imitation and creation through Ottoman-Islamicate terms, Ottoman realism complicates the relation between literature and secularization as it speaks to the institutionalization of modern literature.