THE DEPTHS OF THE MIRROR: A COMPARATIVE READING OF ŞEHBENDERZÂDE FİLİBELİ AHMED HİLMİ’S A’MÂK-I HAYÂL (1910) AND GEORGE MACDONALD’S LILITH (1895)
Özet
This chapter offers a comparative reading of Şehbenderzâde Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi's A'mâk-ı Hayâl (1910) and George MacDonald's Lilith (1895), arguing that two dream-visions composed in mutual ignorance ‒one in the late-Ottoman, the other in the Victorian-Scottish world‒ are structural and metaphysical counterparts. Both arise from the same cultural emergency: a spiritualist reaction against the scientific materialism each author opposed, and both are the late, summary statements of writers whose public doctrinal vocations had collapsed and been reconstituted as visionary fiction. The study reads the two novels comparatively across a series of shared structural and generic categories: the allegorical dream-vision, a realist frame grounding the fantastic, the anti-materialist thesis novel, epistolary mediation, a fairy-tale substratum, a metaphysically governed fantastic, recursive mise en abyme, the central symbol of the mirror, and the dissolution of dualities through ego-death. The two works correspond closely across every category. The deepest convergence is doctrinal ‒the Sufi fenâ/baqā and MacDonald's Eckhartian Gelassenheit‒ and against rivals such as Bunyan, Carlyle, and Stapledon, only Lilith answers to the full set of categories at once. The chapter concludes that the philosophical dream-quest of the modern period is best understood not as a national possession but as a transnational response to a shared crisis of meaning.
Anahtar Kelimeler: A'mâk-ı Hayâl; Lilith; comparative literature; allegorical dream-vision; mirror symbolism; vahdet-i vücûd (unity of being)
Konu Alanı: Sosyal Bilimler -> Dilbilim ve Dil -> Dünya Dilleri ve Edebiyatları
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