Muhayyelât-i ahmet mithat: söylemsel bir strateji olarak “seyahat-i zihniye”

The Ottoman-Turkish author Ahmet Mithat (1844–1912) wrote a great deal of travel novels in which the protagonists travel through the whole world, and many novels and stories that are set in Europe, even before he ever went there himself. While writing these novels he concentrates on different kinds of travel and discusses them either in the prefaces, declaring his arguments as the author Ahmet Mithat, or lets the characters in those novels discuss the issue among themselves. The ‘different kinds of travel’ are those mental travels done while thinking or reading as well as the real, physical ones done by the author himself. These discussions about different kinds of travel is to be perceived within a new perspective after reading Ahmet Mithat’s Avrupa’da Bir Cevelan (‘A Stroll through Europe’ 1889/90), the travelogue he wrote after his own trip to Europe. It is possible to analyze how Ahmet Mithat, while referring to his previous fictional travels in Avrupa’da Bir Cevelan, uses them as a discursive strategy to present himself as the expert on Europe and travel. What is to be analyzed in this article is how Ahmet Mithat constructs an authoritative