| Nasreddin Hodja, Turkey's most beloved folklore character, features in many hundreds of tales popular for their hum or and wisdom across large regions of the world. A growing body of scholarship has emerged in countries where the Hodja tales are well known. Relatively obscure in England and the U.S., however, Hodja tales appear in on ly a few texts published in English from the late seventeenth- through the early twenty-first century, and they have attracted minimal scholarly attention.;The limited exposure of the Hodja tales in English publications provides a uniquely valuable, and previously unexplored, perspective on British, colonial/U.S. and Ottoman/Turkish cultural encounters. I investigate evolutions in text and context characterizing English translations of Hodja tales for children and adult audiences for the purpose of analyzing the dialectic nature of the cultural engagement that produced the texts. Simply stated, my project focuses on Anglo-Turkish and U.S.-Turkish cultural encounters to address ramifications relating to their contemporary alliances. The dissertation also offers theoretically-informed strategies involving literature-based approaches to global citizenship theory and pedagogy.;My study addresses gaps in the scholarly record by developing historical research focusing on English and U.S. cultural encounters with the Hodja tales and conducting textual analysis of English translations of the tales. I utilize this research to supplement current scholarship on theory and pedagogy, focusing on global citizenship, a concept which describes an individual's membership in, and relationship to, the world community. By transforming engagement with texts into a performative exercise in global citizenship, my theoretical model proposes an interdisciplinary approach that harnesses, rather than merely supplements, the many conflicting concepts and perspectives on the body of scholarship relating to global citizenship theory. |
