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, above
all else, with poetry serving as the main vehicle for demonstrating that.
This study is interdisciplinary in approach, taking insights from literary
studies, cultural history, and social theory. It adds to the scholarship
on the rise of early modern Ottoman canons in the fields of visual arts
and music and complements recent work on court patronage. Framed by
ongoing critiques of canon formation among specialists of early modern
Europe and late imperial China, the study offers a comparative perspective
on those issues.