324 sharon kinoshita
identities were, as a result of the Protestant Reformation, troublingly unstable within
Christendom as well as without (Vitkus, 2003: 105–106).
In the seventeenth-century drama of the French âge classique, fascination with the
Ottoman Empire fed into a generalized Orientalism. Representations of the “Turk”
appeared alongside Classical and Biblical themes, as in Racine’s plays Bajazet, Phèdre
and Mithridate, and Athalie. On the one hand, as reports of Ottoman splendor pro-
voked both admiration and dread, “Turk” often came to be synonymous with barba-
rism and cruelty; on the other, French anxieties over political and economic
engagements in the eastern Mediterranean were transformed into a preoccupation
with go-betweens (as in Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme) and the vagaries of misin-
formation and failed or infelicitous communication (as in Bajazet); as with
Montesquieu’s Persian Letters in the following century, theatrical representations of
them provided a “distant mirror” in which to work out questions internal to the nas-
cent French monarchical state (Longino, 2002).
As we approach the present, the Mediterranean, in the view of some historians,
loses its power as a category of historical analysis. Horden and Purcell locate this
attenuation in the twentieth century—the result, in part, of the realignment of its
micro-ecologies in relationship to “the credit economies, political alliances, technolo-
gies and communications networks of the North and West or the Far East” (2000: 3).
For the nineteenth century, historian Edmund Burke suggests that the colonial past,
together with modern narratives of Islam, continue to shape our histories of its east-
ern and southern shores in ways that obscure “the underlying unities” in the paths by
which the Mediterranean came to modernity (2013: 924; but compare Ben-Yehoyada,
this volume). This period, of course, closely coincides with the rise of the linguistic
nationalisms which (Goethe’s advocacy of Weltliteratur notwithstanding) largely
reconfigured the understanding of literary culture along linguistically-specific national
lines. Literature became a vehicle articulating national histories, national identities,
and national dilemmas, decisively moving away from the text-network paradigm that
saw the Alexander Romance continuing to circulate in Ottoman lands through the
nineteenth century (Selden, 2012: 32n.). In particular, where in an earlier moment
the cultures of Latin Europe had adopted and adapted the device of the frame tale
from the Arabophone world, now eastern and southern Mediterranean cultures
adopted the novel as their dominant narrative mode. Perceived as “the paradigmatic
genre of the rational, modern and democratic West, as an ‘advanced’ cultural technol-
ogy,” it displaced or subsumed preexisting forms in places like Greece (folktale, reli-
gious hagiography, myth, chronicles, biography) and Egypt (maqama and sira)
(Layoun, 1990: 9–11, 60–61). At the same time, literary texts and other narratives
produced in this period help reveal what Burke calls “the striking family resemblance”
in the experience of different Mediterranean societies in their encounter with moder-
nity (2013: 922). In his short novel The Murderess, serialized just after the turn of the
twentieth century, Greek writer Alexandros Papadiamandis expresses ambivalence
both toward the simple inhabitants of his native island of Skiatho and toward the
Europeanized bourgeoisie of Athens, where he lived most of his life, articulating “the
restrictions and limitations of the traditional way of life as well as the posturing and
hypocrisies of the new bourgeois order” (Layoun, 1990: 22–24). Similar thematics
are found in the work of Mediterranean writers working in the middle and later parts
of the century.