Tanzimat Literature

Tanzimat literature refers to the modernizing current in Ottoman Turkish letters that arose alongside the Ottoman Empire's Tanzimat reform era of 1839 to 1876, as writers educated in the new reform-era schools and exposed to European, especially French, literature began adapting Western literary forms including the novel, the newspaper serial and Western-style theatre into Ottoman Turkish for the first time. Associated with reform-minded intellectuals and the loosely organized Young Ottomans, the movement's writers used literature to advocate constitutionalism, secular education and social modernization while grappling with how to reconcile Western literary forms with Islamic and Ottoman tradition, a tension that left the movement navigating between reformers and traditionalists rather than resolving the conflict. Tanzimat literature is generally credited with introducing the novel and modern journalism to Turkish letters and with training the generation of writers who would go on to shape the literatures of the Ottoman successor states after the empire's dissolution.