Last of an Age: The Making and Unmaking of a Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Poet

Focusing on the work and reception of the Ottoman poet Zati (1477-1546) during his lifetime and in the decades after, this study explores a time when literature written in Turkish rapidly grew in parallel with an expanding bureaucratic state. It situates the changing reception of Zati within the context of a shift in critical attitudes toward the value and function of poetry that was brought about by newly emergent bureaucratic literati.