Both influenced by One Thousand and One Nights and placed in the intercultural history of romance, John Keats’s “Endymion” and Şeyh Galib’s Hüsn ü Aşk happen to be connected also in their articulation of how empire masks its physical presences in its operations. Pairing the works of Keats and Galib by acknowledging their shared textual references and literary heritages, as well as their poetic similitudes, this talk spotlights not only the cultural but also the historical intersections that underpin the Anglo-Ottoman conjurations of a ghostly empire: it does so by recalling the existence of another “Endymion,” a British warship that was dispatched to attack the Ottoman Empire during the Napoleonic Wars. The two Endymions, this talk suggests, represent the overlapping (historical and imaginative) layers of the affective imperialism that are foundational to the Anglo-Ottoman relations of the romantic century.

Arif Camoglu is Assistant Professor of Literature at NYU Shanghai. His research focuses on the British and Ottoman Turkish literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His most recent writing appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Global Nineteenth Century Studies, and Essays in Romanticism. He is among the editors of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook to Global Literature and Culture in the Romantic Era. Currently Arif is at work on a book manuscript, titled Specters of Empire: Anglo-Ottoman Narratives of Imperial Sovereignty in the Romantic Century.