ABSTRACT

This Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of Turkish literature within both a local and global context.

Across eight thematic sections a collection of subject experts use close readings of literature materials to provide a critical survey of the main issues and topics within the literature. The chapters provide analysis on a wide range of genres and text types, including novels, poetry, religious texts, and drama, with works studied ranging from the fourteenth century right up to the present day. Using such a historic scope allows the volume to be read across cultures and time, while simultaneously contextualizing and investigating how modern Turkish literature interacts with world literature, and finds its place within it. Collectively, the authors challenge the national literary historiography by replacing the Ottoman Turkish literature in the Anatolian civilizations with its plurality of cultures. They also seek to overcome the institutional and theoretical shortcomings within current study of such works, suggesting new approaches and methods for the study of Turkish literature.

The Routledge Handbook on Turkish Literature marks a new departure in the reading and studying of Turkish literature. It will be a vital resource for those studying literature, Middle East studies, Turkish and Ottoman history, social sciences, and political science.

chapter |16 pages

Introduction

section Section I|39 pages

Mystical Genesis

chapter 1|10 pages

It All Starts With a Dream

The Motif of Dream in Turkish Literature

section Section II|45 pages

Ottoman Poetics

chapter 4|11 pages

Words That Are Daggers

Reassessing the Historical Dimensions of the Ottoman Kaside

chapter 6|11 pages

Towards a Theory of Ottoman Allegory

Allegorical Narratives From Ḥüsn ü Dil to Ḥüsn ü ʿAşq

chapter 7|9 pages

Human Voice Echoing in the Silence of God

Tevfik Fikret and Modern Ottoman Poetry

section Section III|34 pages

Cultures of Reading

chapter 9|11 pages

Rewriting as an Ottoman Translation Practice

Two Bīẖ-i Çīnī Translations by Sixteenth-Century Poets

chapter 10|10 pages

Narrative as the Literary Public

Reader and Author Figures in Modern Ottoman Turkish Literature (1866–1896)

section Section IV|48 pages

Women and Gender

chapter 11|10 pages

Methodological Challenges in Late Ottoman and Turkish Literary Scholarship

Gender, Aesthetics, and Sociopolitical Contexts

chapter 13|9 pages

Gendered Narratives of Ottoman Prose Fiction

The “Wiles of Women” Stories

chapter 14|16 pages

Towards a Gynocritical Study of Turkish Fiction

Contemporary Turkish Women's Literature (1950–1970)

section Section V|35 pages

Linguistic Diversity

chapter 16|11 pages

Comparative Glimpse of the Early Steps of Novelistic Imagination in Turkish

Armeno-Turkish Novels of the 1850s and 1860s

chapter 17|11 pages

Making the “Other” Your Own

The Challenge of Modern Kurdish Literature Regarding Kurdish Voices in Turkish

section Section VI|47 pages

National Identity

chapter 18|12 pages

National Literary Historiography in Turkey

Mehmet Fuat Köprülü and His Legacy

chapter 20|10 pages

Imagining the Nation From the Street

Nationalism, Daily Life, and Emotions in the Short Stories of Ömer Seyfettin

section Section VII|62 pages

Literary Modernisms

chapter 23|13 pages

“We, Too, Are Eastern”

Nâzım Hikmet's Futurist and Anti-colonial Modernity

chapter 24|11 pages

The Emergence and the End of an Endemic Genre in Turkish Literature

The Case of the Village Novel in a Comparative Context

chapter 25|12 pages

Poetic Urbanism in Turkish Modernist Poetry

Dramatic Monologue in the Second New Wave

chapter 26|10 pages

Laughter in the Dark

The Modernist Avant-Garde Path in Turkish Literature

section Section VIII|36 pages

Political Turmoils and Traumas

chapter 27|10 pages

The Aufhebung of Traumatic Memory

Literary Responses to Military Coups in Turkey and Çetin Altan's Büyük Gözaltı