Öteki metinler, öteki kadınlar : Ermeni harfli Türkçe romanlar ve kadın imgesi
Author
Erğinci, Erkan
Advisor
Mignon, Laurent
Date
2007Publisher
Bilkent University
Language
English
Type
ThesisItem Usage Stats
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Abstract
The first instances of the novel genre in Turkish literature were written in the
Tanzimat period by Armenian-Ottoman authors. Despite having been written in
Turkish, these works were printed in the Armenian alphabet. Akabi Hikâyesi, the
first of these novels, was written by Vartan Paşa and published in 1851.
According to the “Bibliography of Works Published in the Old Script” compiled
by the Turkish National Library, the second novel to be published was
Hovhannes Balıkçyan’s Karnig, Gülünya ve Dikran’ın Dehşelu Vefatleri
Hikayesi, in 1862. Six years later Hovsep Maruş’s Bir Sefil Zevce became the
third. To this day, neither of the latter two books has ever been published in the
roman characters of the official modern Turkish alphabet. This thesis explores
why these two hitherto-neglected works deserve to be studied as an integral part
of Turkish literary history. According to established theoretical approaches, a
work ought to be located and appraised within the literary tradition of the
language in which it was written, without regard to the various alphabets in which
it may have been published or any ethnic identity or religious persuasion ascribed
to its author. This is the view defended in this thesis. Besides constituting the first
domestic specimens of a genre originally foreign to the Ottoman Empire, these
works hold the distinction of being the first to assert that Ottoman society’s
stereotypical image of the woman needed to change. While there exists an
extensive scholarly literature on the image of the woman presented in the first
Turkish novels of Arabic script, there has been no study of the image of the
woman in the first Turkish novels of Armenian script. Examining the latter
novels’ revisionist image of the woman through their portrayal of the position of
the woman in marriage, in the public sphere, and in the family, this thesis
investigates why the Turkish literature’s first Armenian-Ottoman novelists
adopted and championed this new image of the woman.
Keywords
Turkish novels published in Armenian scriptsOttoman Armenians
image of women in literature
Tanzimat novel