عنوان

'The Abhorred Name of Turk': Muslims and the Politics of Identity in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads

TL49211

انگلیسی

'The Abhorred Name of Turk': Muslims and the Politics of Identity in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads

[Thesis]

Katie Sue Sisneros

Matar, Nabil

University of Minnesota

2016

296

Committee members: Casale, Giancarlo; Scheil, Katherine; Watkins, John

Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-369-60172-5

Ph.D.

English

University of Minnesota

2016

From historiographies to dramas, captivity narratives to mercantile ledgers, Anglo-Muslim studies has been in pursuit of an overall conceptualization the uniquely insular English population had of the Muslim Turks of the Ottoman Empire. But to approach an understanding of what the English thought of the Turk, one must necessarily consider the broad range of socio-political and economic conditions of the various echelons of English society. This dissertation explores a popular literature that - although a significant number of these texts exist that deals with the crucial relationship between Christians and Muslims - has heretofore never been considered as a whole in the context of how they represent the Muslim Turk. Broadside ballads, consumed widely and across the social and economic spectrum, were more accessible to and often indeed written expressly for the poor population of England who were largely illiterate and had little to no expendable time or income, and the Turk was a favored metaphor in broadside ballad literature throughout the seventeenth century. I argue that the function of the term "Turk" in seventeenth century broadside ballads depended so much on (and whose fluctuation was so closely attuned to) local politics that the term was largely stripped of any meaning, functioning simply as an "enemy" against which the English compared themselves and defined proper "Englishness."

European history; English; 17th century; Concept formation; Language culture relationship; Terminology; Language history; Metaphor; Politics; British & Irish literature

Language, literature and linguistics;Social sciences;Broadside ballads;England;English Civil Wars;Great Britain;Ottoman Empire;Popular literature

Saleh Almutawa, Ghinaa

Matar, Nabil

English

University of Minnesota

1870036369; 10245273

p

[Thesis]

276903

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