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A Tale of Two Endymions: Affective Imperialism in the Romances of Keats and Galib

Alongside the physical encounters between the British and Ottoman states in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there existed a mutual poetic tendency to imagine imperial sovereignty in its affect, as an immaterial power which was rather chased after than enforced upon the subject. The histories of the two empires, as such, were interconnected not only diplomatically and geopolitically but also imaginarily, which this talk unpacks by reading the poems of Keats and Şeyh Galib comparatively. My comparisons between “Endymion” and Hüsn ü Aşk spotlight another layer in the historical terrain of Anglo-Ottoman relations, not an alternative story of imperiality: they complement the ways in which the inter-imperial negotiations of power are historicized by unearthing their affective infrastructures. Comparing the poetry of Galib and Keats by attending to their literary-cultural points of intersection and poetic similitudes hence establishes the comparability of the imaginaries of sovereignty that percolated through both empires historically.