Context and Content

Abstract

Pushing further in the direction of reading content and the messages that sustained the drive for literacy in the late Ottoman and early Republican periods, this chapter identifies four thematic tensions facing young readers. Each of these pairings — the religious and the secular; the family and the nation state; the new and the old and the global and the local — affords the opportunity to highlight the contrasts that played such a major role in establishing the didactic certainty prevalent in the children’s literature of this period. At the same time these pair-ings also reveal the ambiguities that undermined these seemingly clear- cut binaries against the background of the changes affecting the late Ottoman and early Republican periods. The chapter shows not only the range of genre, politicization, humor and geographical references on display in this rapidly expanding literature but also the extent to which readers’ choices were beginning to be dictated as much by the market as by the pedagogical imperatives of officialdom, whether Ottoman or Republican. The shifting context surrounding the publication of reading materials intended for the young comes through clearly as the chapter examines each of these thematic categories in turn.