University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2018 Forging The Progressive Path: Literary Assemblies And Enlightenment Societies In Azerbaijan, 1850-1928 Kelsey Rice University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Islamic World and Near East History Commons Recommended Citation Rice, Kelsey, "Forging The Progressive Path: Literary Assemblies And Enlightenment Societies In Azerbaijan, 1850-1928" (2018). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2913. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2913 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2913 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Forging The Progressive Path: Literary Assemblies And Enlightenment Societies In Azerbaijan, 1850-1928 Abstract This dissertation examines the role ethnic Azeri enlightenment societies in the Southeastern Caucasus played in the broader movement of secular modernist reform throughout the Muslim world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century. These societies, which published literature and periodicals, founded schools, built reading rooms, and sponsored musical and dramatic performances, were the primary means through which intellectuals in Azerbaijan mobilized projects of cultural reform. Starting in the mid-nineteenth-century almost every significant Azeri artist and intellectual was involved in these societies to some degree, either as active members or through benefiting from society patronage. Azeri reformist intellectuals were ambitious in their scope, and through the circulation of their periodicals, touring theater troupes, and the involvement of several leading Azeri figures in the constitutional movements in both Iran and the Ottoman Empire, they enjoyed influence well beyond the Turkic south Caucasus, reaching throughout the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and Central Asia.