Adventures of a Slave Girl
Regular price
€97.99
19th century
19th-century literature
A01=Samipasazade Sezai
Author_Samipasazade Sezai
Black Sea slave trade
Category=FBA
Circassian female slavery
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eq_fiction
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forthcoming
Global slavery studies
Late Ottoman History
Near Eastern slavery
Ottoman Empire
Ottoman History
Ottoman Slavery
Ottoman Turkish literature
slavery
Tanzimat
Tanzimat Literature
Product details
- ISBN 9781399558549
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 30 Sep 2026
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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The Adventures of a Slave Girl (Sergüzeşt), written by the iconic Ottoman realist writer Samipaşazade Sezai (1859–1936), was the first anti-slavery novel published in the Ottoman Empire. Set in Istanbul and Egypt at the end of the 19th century, it tells the story of Dilber, a Circassian girl sold into domestic slavery at only nine years old. We follow her through her tragic ordeal, dreaming of freedom and love even as she is sold from one abusive master to another.
Sensational in its time for its explicit anti-slavery stance and its use of the politically taboo word ‘freedom’, the publication of this book placed the author under palace scrutiny and ultimately into voluntary exile.
Supported by a full critical apparatus, this widely cited novel is published in English for the first time. As global slavery studies expand beyond the Atlantic, it offers rare insight into the gendered and racialised dimensions of child and female slavery in the late Ottoman Empire, in spite of the Tanzimat reforms aimed at cracking down on the trade.
Samipaşazade Sezai (1859–1936) was an Ottoman writer known for his novel, Sergüzeşt (Adventure, 1889) and his short story collection, Küçük Şeyler (Little Things, 1892). Iclal Vanwesenbeeck is Associate Professor at the State University of New York, Fredonia. Her current research focuses on animal studies, primarily animals and the Iraq war, and music and literature; in particular, opera in late Ottoman literature. She is also the translator of various poems by the Ottoman poet Nigâr binti Osman, Halide Edip’s fiction, prose poems by Mehmet Rauf, and Samipaşazade Sezai’s short story, ‘Pantomime’. Burcu Karahan is Lecturer in Turkish Literature and Language at the Comparative Literature Department, Stanford University. She specialises in late 19th- and early 20th-century Ottoman literature, with a particular focus on the novel, literary translation, sexuality and Ottoman modernisation. Her current research and translation project explores erotic fiction from the Second Constitutional Era, examining its connections to national and literary history.
