Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- PART I OTTOMAN BACKGROUND AND TRANSITION
- PART II REPUBLIC OF TURKEY
- 7 Migration and Turkey: the dynamics of state, society and politics
- 8 The migration story of Turks in Germany: from the beginning to the end
- 9 Politics and political parties in Republican Turkey
- 10 Economic change in twentieth-century Turkey: is the glass more than half full?
- 11 Ideology, context and interest: the Turkish military
- 12 Kurds and the Turkish State
- 13 Islam and politics in contemporary Turkey
- 14 Sufism and Islamic groups in contemporary Turkey
- 15 Contestation and collaboration: women’s struggles for empowerment in Turkey
- 16 Art and architecture in modern Turkey: the Republican period
- 17 The novel in Turkish: narrative tradition to Nobel prize
- 18 A brief history of modern Istanbul
- Select bibliography
- Index
17 - The novel in Turkish: narrative tradition to Nobel prize
from PART II - REPUBLIC OF TURKEY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- PART I OTTOMAN BACKGROUND AND TRANSITION
- PART II REPUBLIC OF TURKEY
- 7 Migration and Turkey: the dynamics of state, society and politics
- 8 The migration story of Turks in Germany: from the beginning to the end
- 9 Politics and political parties in Republican Turkey
- 10 Economic change in twentieth-century Turkey: is the glass more than half full?
- 11 Ideology, context and interest: the Turkish military
- 12 Kurds and the Turkish State
- 13 Islam and politics in contemporary Turkey
- 14 Sufism and Islamic groups in contemporary Turkey
- 15 Contestation and collaboration: women’s struggles for empowerment in Turkey
- 16 Art and architecture in modern Turkey: the Republican period
- 17 The novel in Turkish: narrative tradition to Nobel prize
- 18 A brief history of modern Istanbul
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction: historical context and literary periods
An ongoing debate persists about the literary canon in Turkey. Does Turkey actually have such a canon? If so, what merits inclusion? What are the texts that might establish the canon? The debates are pertinent to this survey in that they attempt to describe not only the characteristics of literature in Turkey, but to catalogue the mix of figures, images and tropes at play in that literature. As a framework for a literary survey, the canon is useful for tracking a progression of genres and themes, for identifying local and foreign influences, and for revealing a projected ‘reader-citizen’. The audience of any canon is in one respect the ‘nation’, imagined or otherwise. Furthermore, as a body of texts that are models of form and content, the canon is one way to determine the changing cultural logic of a national tradition as well as the sites of its political and ideological power. (It hardly bears emphasis that literary production in Turkey is political.) In a context of traditional narratives transformed by European influences, the Ottoman and Turkish novel functioned to mediate contradictory forces and to open up new sites of identification. There is perhaps no better anthropological or aesthetic artefact with which to read social change, to gauge resistance and to trace the scars of history and ideology on local populations than the novel. In the process of ‘reading’ modernity, politics and the novel together, this survey compiles a running commentary of texts that constitute one possible canon of the Turkish novel.
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- The Cambridge History of Turkey , pp. 472 - 503Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
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