Depicting the Late Ottoman Empire in Turkish Autobiographies

The period between the 1880s and the 1920s was a time of momentous changes in the Ottoman Empire. This book analyses autobiographical narratives describing the part of their authors’ lives that was spent while the Ottoman Empire still existed. Among the presented texts are autobiographies by writers, journalists, soldiers and politicians. _x005F_x000D_ While the official Turkish republican discourse went towards a downright dismissal of the imperial past, autobiographical narratives offer a much more balanced picture. This book aims at showing some examples of how the authors endeavoured to paint what one of them, the doctor Tevfik Saglam, called "images of a past world."