Literature’s Refuge by William Stroebel appears as the new addition to the Princeton University Press series, Translation/Transnation, which has done much to explore the transnational status of literature for more than a quarter century. Within this broader effort to transcend nation–state boundaries in comparative literature, Literature’s Refuge turns its focus precisely to borderlands, that is, to the literary production of the entangled Grecophone and Turcophone borderlands that were removed, unrooted, and displaced by the mechanisms of modern border logic and the institutions of the nation–state, most catastrophically through the Greco–Turkish population exchange of 1923. With an impressive array of carefully assembled archival material, Stroebel recovers works of literature that had long remained hidden or displaced from their original contexts, such as Greek-language Islamic poetry in Arabic script and Turkish-language poetry and stories in Greek script (Karamanlidika), and reframes works absorbed into national canons, including those of Halide Edip Adıvar, Stratis Doukas, and C. P. Cavafy, back in the borderscape. At the same time, Literature’s Refuge commits to book history, dissolving literary canons and raising questions about literary production, consumption, authorship, and readership. In doing so, Stroebel makes a methodological tweak while focusing on material and social networks, foregrounding what he terms “textual handlers,” who are “writers, editors, printers, binders, readers, copyists, oral storytellers, translators, and others” (p. 26), and situating textual handlers as central both to the production of the book and to shaping its afterlife. Essentially, the book’s narrative, detailed and powerful, as well as novel in its use of Victorian-style descriptive chapter titles, binds together its multifarious aims to ultimately remap the literary geography of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Literature’s Refuge consists of five chapters that coalesce into a study of networks of textual handlers spanning the 17th to the 21st century. The first chapter centers on Şānī’s Tuhfe- i Şānī be Zeban- ı Yunani (The Gift of Şānī in the Greek Tongue), from the 1660s, and how Şānī and the Grecophone Muslim readers of the Tuhfe struggle to declare the place of the Greek language and its poetic tradition within Islam. In the second chapter, Stroebel shows how the scattered Greek publishing world across the Eastern Mediterranean during the first half of the 20th century and, alike, Cavafy’s work within this network were drawn into a project of consolidation under institutional Hellenism, particularly through the philological interventions of George Savidis in relation to Cavafy. The following chapter examines the multifaceted narratives of the Greco–Turkish War that emerge in Halide Edip’s Shirt of Flame and Stratis Doukas’s A Prisoner of War’s Story, through the work of textual handlers, including editors, witnesses, and transcribers, that complicate testimonial literature. Similarly, after the fourth chapter explores the Karamanlidika manuscripts of Agathangelos following the population exchange as cultural collective cultural resources bypassing commercial publishing networks with their readership, the final chapter turns to the role of textual handlers on a meta-level, through Mehmet Yashin’s contemporary novel, Sınırdışı Saatler (The Deported Hours), in which the endangered Cypriot dialect, alongside Karamanlidika, is refracted through the endeavor to read and rewrite the multiscript Sâ‘atnâme (Book of Hours), a codex that passed from hand to hand across generations in Cyprus.

From the outset, in its preface and the introduction, Literature’s Refuge distinguishes itself from earlier comparative literary studies, which tend to remain within national boundaries and construct comparisons across them, by instead engaging with the literary borderscape, displaced literatures, and literatures of the displaced. The preface and introduction also provide a detailed historical and theoretical overview that grounds the book’s contribution, albeit with greater emphasis on the mechanisms of institutional Hellenism and the Global North’s monopolization of the Hellenic, at the expense of a comparable engagement with the Ottoman context that the later chapters take up. The five chapters that follow form a symmetrical engagement with the borderscape, unfolding across temporal, geographical, and multilingual dimensions. Whereas the first chapter deals with Şānī’s 17th-century Greek language Islamic poetry codex from Ioannina, in present day northwestern Greece, the final chapter turns to a contemporary Turkish language (and partly in Greek script) novel from Cyprus, in which the narrator searches for a medieval Islamic book of prayers accommodating Arabic, Greek, and Latin scripts, as well as Turkish and Greek languages. This symmetry is also present in Stroebel’s pursuit of the histories of books caught in the rise and threat of national publishing networks at the turn of the 20th century in Greece and Turkey, tracing phases of assimilation, censorship, and displacement in the second, third, and fourth chapters. In doing this, Stroebel aligns and pays equal attention to the map of Cavafy’s weak social ties charted through editors and readers across the Eastern Mediterranean, to the journey of handwritten codices of Karamanli Turkish poems by Agathangelos from interior Anatolia to Greece and the United States, and to the role of textual handlers in shaping the testimonial literature of Doukas in Greece and Adıvar in Turkey.

Şānī’s Tuhfe, just like handwritten books of Agathangelos, is a significant archival finding and demonstrates Stroebel’s linguistic skill in transliterating and translating the piece. With limited information about the book’s transmission history or about Şānī himself, Stroebel relies meticulously on contextual evidence and on close reading to situate the Tuhfe and its community, particularly in relation to Ottoman Islamic law and its ties to earlier practices of Turkish vernacularization, although he does not address the function of the Ottoman caliphate, which could illuminate further dynamics of the conflict. A more pressing issue, however, concerns the historiographical framing of the chapter and the book as a whole. How does Şānī’s conflict with the Turcophone authorities of the centralized Ottoman state resonate with other chapters challenging modern border logic? Structurally, what sense of continuity emerges in the role of textual handlers from the 17th century through the 20th and into the 21st century? Stroebel emphasizes that he has no nostalgia for the Ottoman imperial past in dealing with the plurality of human geographies, and the chapter’s early modern setting may partly serve to demonstrate that stance. Also, regarding content, Stroebel mentions the lack of academic interest in Modern Greek studies on Grecophone Muslim literature beyond the work of scholars such as Yorgos Dedes and Phokion Kotzageorgis, and also gestures toward a notable gap in the book itself alongside the field: the Grecophone literature of Muslims around the population exchange. Such a gap indeed cannot be readily addressed without a substantial effort that corresponds to the scope and depth of Literature’s Refuge.

From a methodological perspective, Literature’s Refuge raises important questions, especially concerning circulation, networks, and world literature. By foregrounding a wider group of textual handlers, Stroebel sidelines the material networks of national publishing and instead traces texts and circles that moved into the philological “underground” (p. 6). This intervention requires both extensive archival skill and knowledge of the context for close engagement with the subjects, which the book clearly demonstrates. Comparable approaches to networks have appeared in the field of history, such as Dana Sajdi’s The Barber of Damascus (2013) and Sajdi’s notion of “nouveau literacy” to describe authors of unusual or humble backgrounds. But at the same time, Stroebel’s analysis allows a plurality of methodologies to work together, evident in his rigorous close readings alongside network analysis, just as he places canonical writers alongside lesser-known figures, showing how their interplay reveals broader dynamics in the region’s literatures. Moreover, the book invites further exploration of “weak” social ties, borrowing Paul Saint-Amour’s notion of “weak theory.” One curious extension, for better or worse, might have been to consider weak social ties for figures beyond Cavafy, particularly in the relationship between Halide Edip Adıvar and Arnold J. Toynbee, who was the first Koraes Chair at King’s College London, an influential writer in the Anglophone historiography of Greco-Turkish relations, and a foreign office official who played a direct role in Turkish-Greek affairs from 1917 to 1919. Given the book’s investment in the population exchange and modern border logic, Toynbee emerges as a significant and interesting actor, not least through his friendship with Adıvar during the Greco-Turkish War and her subsequent exile in Britain. Ultimately, such points leave room for future research, and in no way diminish the book’s achievements.

Literature’s Refuge offers a new window into philology that promises to inspire future scholarship in comparative literature, as well as in Greek and Turkish studies. In particular, having the chance to read it on the borderland facing the island of Symi made it a pleasure to witness the potential of such scholarship to transcend philological checkpoints.