Challenging Conventions: Love, Lovers, and Beloveds in Early Modern Ottoman Poetry: Christiane Czygan and Hatice Aynur, eds. De Gruyter, 2025. 206 pp.: ISBN: 9783111341545.

Abstract

Challenging Conventions: Love, Lovers, and Beloveds in Early Modern Ottoman Poetry, edited by Christiane Czygan and Hatice Aynur, is a collection of articles that examines the concepts of love, lover, and beloved in early modern Ottoman poetry through five thematic sections. One of the key findings of these studies is that love is not merely an emotional theme, but a multilayered phenomenon encompassing social, ontological, and mystical dimensions. The volume explores how love is represented particularly in poetic genres such as the ġazel and the ḳaṣīde, as well as how power relations between lover and beloved are constructed through language. Some contributions focus on topics such as the position of female poets, the relationship between love and madness through the figure of Mecnūn, and the transformative nature of love in Sufi poetry. Another issue the book brings to mind, even if not always as its central concern, is the blurred boundary between the poetic narrator and the historical author. This, in turn, raises the broader question of whether Ottoman literature is entirely fictional. The studies in the volume invite readers to rethink the meaning and function of love, while also demonstrating that this literary tradition is shaped both by established conventions and by traces of social reality.