Constantinopolitan modernities: Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf and Halide Edib

Abstract

This is a polemical paper about how a city may be perceived in different registers. Istanbul as a bartering piece in peace negotiations, as in the case of Leonard Woolf’s The Future of Constantinople (1917), and Istanbul as a space that evokes modernist responses by two female writers- one of them a young British novelist on her tour of the continent before WWI, and the other a Turkish novelist writing about her experience of the British Occupation in 1918, a year after Leonard Woolf’s tract (Brits occupied Istanbul from late Nov 1918- Sep 1923).1 Gathering these modern responses to Constantinople’s geographical and symbolic location, I try to formulate aspects of ‘Constantinopolitan modernities’ that engage with the meanings that the city has taken on and generated.