| dc.description.abstract | Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar’s (1864-1944) first article titled “İstanbul’da
Bir Frenk” (A European in Istanbul) was published in 1884 and from that time
onwards his 41 novels, 9 story books, 4 plays, and 6 collection of essays
composed of his articles and polemics have been published. In this study,
Gürpınar’s ten novels, namely Bir Sevda Denklemi (An Equation of Love, 1899),
Metres (The Mistress, 1899), Acı Gülüş (Bitter Laugh, 1923), Ben Deli miyim?
(Am I Mad? 1925), Kokotlar Mektebi (The School of Cocottes, 1929), Gönül Bir
Yeldeğirmenidir (The Heart is a Windmill, 1943), Dünyanın Mihveri Kadın mı,
Para mı? (What Is the Axis of the World, Woman or Money? 1949), Kaderin
Cilvesi (Turn of Fortune, 1964), Can Pazarı (A Matter of Life and Death, 1968),
and Namuslu Kokotlar (The Virtuous Cocottes, 1973) have been analyzed within
the framework of ethical criticism, especially with regard to the repeated themes,
the interference of the author and the narrator, and the intellectual sources of
Gürpınar’s thought.
Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar had adopted a moral discourse in his writings
and created his fictional world around the themes of struggle for existence,
starvation, moral decline, and infidelity, which are among significant notions in
the field of ethics. The intrusion of the author and the narrator in fictional worlds
are other salient and constitutive features of Gürpınar’s fiction. Arthur
Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and social Darwinist ideas, to which he had
frequently referred, also played substantial roles in the formation of his fictional
world. That is why it is vital to understand the system of values that lies beneath
the author’s thought while analyzing his works. In this context, the criticisms
regarding Gürpınar’s idea of the novel have been reconsidered; his works have
been examined from the perspective of ethical criticism; and the system of values
that shape his fictional world has been portrayed through a text-centered reading. | en_US |
