The historical narrative of XIX century Ottoman society is centered on the political modernization of the empire; and on the analogy between the political reforms of modernization and the transformation of classical Ottoman literature (Divan). The emergence of new literary forms and genres and new aesthetic debates; therefore; seem to be the direct consequences of Empire’s political exposure to the Western influence. The main reason for this analogy was the fact that individual novels such as Akabis Story, Felátun Bey and Rakim Efendi, The Awakening, The Carriage Affair, The Fresh or The Kosher? mostly dealt with various aspects and many socio-cultural ambiguities of modernization process. The literary history of the birth of the Ottoman novel is supported by the common assumption that the Ottoman intellectuals highlighted the question of what is the proper model for modernization’ in addition to the identity crises resulted from the wide-ranging transformation of the Ottoman society. XIX century– reforms and modernization movement, which came to the fore by the declaration of the Firman, exploited the literary field as the basic domain for consolidating paradigm of'modernity’ in the XIX century Ottoman context. Accordingly, modernization was a transition from one particular 'circle of civilization’ to the other, namely from the Eastern to the Western, and these two 'circles’ were mutually exclusive, monolithic entities.
The visible influence of Cartesian dualism in the concept of modernity introduced a specific historical narrative and a certain mode of representing political identities. The former depends on attributing symbolic value to literature as the latter cultivates different binary oppositions like East-West, traditional-modern, old-new, Ottoman-Europe and Ottoman-Turkish Republican. Namik Kemal’s famous criticism in 'Introduction to Celaleddin Harzemshah’ to distinguish clearly the 'old’/’traditional’ literature from the 'new’/’modern’ is the essential foundation of conceiving ‘old’ and new' as mutually exclusive entities and of creating a hierarchy between them. He paves the way for opposing Ottoman classical and ‘realist’ literatures against each other on the basis of their aesthetic value. The definition of‘realism’ and positioning Ottoman classical and ‘new’ literatures against each other, therefore, gain prominence from the point of representing political identities in addition to depicting concrete images of the ‘proper against the ‘super modernization models. The duality of figurative narrative structure of Ottoman classical poetry as opposed to the European realism’s literal narrative has a central role in the identification of binary oppositions.
Divan poetry, thus, is equated with Eastern phantasmagoric narrative, lacking the ability of providing an accurate picture of the world. The novel in turn symbolizes Western ability of grasping the world as it is due to positivism. The dualities of poetry-prose (novel), phantasmagoric-realistic, figurative-literal had been established and followed by dualities between the terms of Eastern, Islamic epistemology, tradition, and old versus the terms of Western, scientific epistemology, modern and new. The contrast, for instance, between the ‘old’ poetic style of Ottoman classical literature and the ‘new’ poetic understanding formed under the influence of Western literature, underestimation of their common aesthetic techniques, styles and structures, and their conception as two different aesthetic domains started to underline the ‘progress’ of literary reforms in the XIX century. It was soon identified with the success of political reforms of Tanzimat era, and the critical discourse was dominated by the idea that the field of literary production is the mirror of political conditions. This brings us to the second discursive mechanism, the myth of progress and development, which is strongly tied to the logic of binary oppositions.
The XIX century literary debates on the aesthetic criteria of ‘proper’ literature signify the essential paradigm shift in the field of literary production. Attracting many Ottoman intellectuals, this debate intrinsically became the field of defining social, cultural, political 'modernity' in the Ottoman context through the clarification of aesthetic criteria which separate the 'modern' from the 'traditional', the 'old' from the 'new', the backwardness' from the 'progress'. The discussions on 'the classical literature', the matter of prosody, the content of proper poetry and introduction of fresh concepts such as 'liberty', 'justice' and 'reason' were among the focal points of the 'new Ottoman poetry' debate. Accordingly, the Ottoman classical poetry became the symbol of political backwardness, childishness and underdevelopment of the Empire whereas characteristics of being realistic, mature, and progressive were symbolically equated with the success of Ottoman modernization, i. e. Tanzimat era.