Research project Constantinople around 1900 as a multilingual literary world from Swedish perspectives

Swedish literature holds a corpus of multilingual literary texts in which Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) around 1900 is portrayed. These texts, roughly a century or more old, are of great interest to study from perspectives which challenge traditional views of language, nation and identity shaped by a monolingual paradigm. With a focus on the role of languages and scripts for literary world-making, my research explores the crafting of Constantinople around 1900 as an immanent literary world which is multilingual, transgeneric, transgressing single national literatures, and still today accessible for readers. The selected works examined in this project are originally composed in Swedish or translated into Swedish from French, Italian, English, German, Turkish, and Greek. Through them, the many vernacular languages of cosmopolitan Constantinople are conveyed to Swedish readers. Phrases and words in Ottoman Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Kurdish, Arabic, and French are recorded and transcribed according to Swedish norms of articulation and its Roman alphabet. Important themes to study are – besides travelling – the situation of women (including veiling practices and life in the harems); religious rituals and norms; education, particularly in languages and the arts; warfare, massacres, genocides and life in exile; all of them issues of importance also today. The result will be presented as two chapters of a monograph in Swedish.