[AMERICAN FEMINISM & EUGENICS DISCUSSIONS IN TURKEY] Sevgili düsman [i.e., Dear enemy]. Translated by Celâleddin Ekrem. Foreword by Ahmed Cevad [Emre].

Original pictorial full dark green cloth, with a blind-tooled illustration on the front board by French illustrator Jean Hée. Gilt lettering of the title and author's name on the front board. Demy 8vo. (21 x 14 cm). In Ottoman script (Old Turkish with Arabic letters). v, [1], 395 p., with original line drawings by the author. Pages age-toned, hinges repaired, and lettering on the spine slightly faded. Overall, a very good copy. First Ottoman Turkish edition in a striking collectible hardcover of the novel written by Jean Webster, an American novelist, a suffragist, a supporter of higher education for women and an active advocate of social reform for orphans and prisons. This hardback edition is seemingly rarer than the paperback edition issued in the same year. We couldn't find any information about the print runs of both editions, however, according to the auction records and market, this edition we have was published for the collectors in a smaller run. The original cover illustration by Jean Hée, also known for the illustrations of Alice au Pays des Merveilles (1930), was blind tooled on this edition's front cover. Both written in epistolary fashion, Webster's Dear Enemy was a sequel to her first best-seller Daddy-Long-Legs. The presented Ottoman-Turkish edition starts with an important foreword by Ahmed Cevad Emre (1876-1961), the first full-text translator of Homer's Odyssey and Iliad in Turkish, a productive grammar scholar, a politician. This important foreword was written on behalf of the Dil Encümeni [i.e., The Language Council]. Foreword of a novel was providing a platform to educate the reader who newly met the genre during the Early Republic. Emre's foreword begins with an explanation of the "social novel" (içtimâî roman) genre, little-known back then. He states that Dear Enemy was chosen to be printed under the Series of Gençlik Kitabhânesi [i.e., Youth Literature] by the Language Council, precisely because of its social front. Then he summarizes both Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy by focusing on the protagonists, exemplary female figures who undertake social responsibilities in their coming-of-age stories. Especially in the Dear Enemy part, Emre underlines the protagonist's true calling of social duty and the newly modernizing Republic's immediate need for a social model like the orphanage depicted in the book. The other main but implicit reason for Dear Enemy's being chosen to be translated is the notions that discuss and support Eugenics in the text. After the Ottoman Empire had declined, in the new nation-state, the subject of Eugenics gained popularity among the early Turkish Republican elite and medical bureaucrats: "The discourse of Turkish eugenics aimed to create a healthy and robust Turkish society with a collective national identity with policies adapted from the West to both catch up with the West and prove itself against the West in the process of modernization." (Çelik & Karakus). Webster's novel was one of the good mediums for spreading these ideas to the public. Because "Webster became increasingly convinced by hereditarian reasoning and used her novels as a medium for didacticism on the subject, explicitly teaching her readers about eugenic family studies and implicitly supporting laws mandating the involuntary sterilization or segregation of the mentally disabled and some classes of criminals, legislation that began appearing at state levels in 1907." (Keely). Emre, the writer of the Dear Enemy's foreword, was also the author of a book titled Bizde Kadin [i.e., Women in Our Society, 1912] that evaluates the woman question in late Ottoman society. He was also the publisher of the periodical Muhit, of which one of the main subjects is Social Darwinism in the context of Kemalist ideals of the time. "Muhit served the Kemalist ideology of creating modern women with traditional roles at home and fit and healthy children for the future of the Republic. From 1931 onwards Muhit shifted from pro-n

Lingue: Turkish, Ottoman (1500-1928)