Browsing by Subject "Turkish fiction 20th century History and criticism."

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Open Access
Esat Mahmut Karakurt`un roman(s)larında erkek kahramanlar
(2006) Bozkurt, Senem Timuroğlu
Esat Mahmut Karakurt (1902-1977) was an influential writer of Turkish literature in the Republican period, especially with his romance, adventure, and spy narratives that reached a large female audience. After he published his first collection of short stories in 1926, Karakurt wrote a total of 16 novels until 1960. His novels, which were serialized first in newspapers, helped increase their circulation, and most volumes were reprinted eight to ten times. All Karakurt narratives were adapted at least once as screenplays. Because they are not considered “serious” literature, few analyses of popular romances are available in both Turkish and western literary studies, and the ones that exist are mostly devoted to women authors and their heroines. Therefore, this thesis aims both to revitalize the semi-forgotten novelistic romances of an influential author, and to fill a gap in romance studies by examining a male author’s approach to romance by analyzing his heroes. The thesis focuses on two of Esat Mahmut Karakurt’s novels, namely Allaha Ismarladık (Goodbye, 1936) and İlk ve Son (The First and the Last, 1940), although frequent references are made to the author’s other novels as well. The theoretical framework of the study is influenced by Tania Modleski’s and Janice Radway’s analyses that are guided by feminist and psychoanalytic considerations, as well as by John G. Cawelti’s work focusing on the structure of romance. In this three-part thesis, first, the physical, educational, and professional attributes, the relations of love, and the ideological discourses of the male characters in Karakurt’s novels are analyzed. It is observed that these heroes are often handsome bachelors in their thirties, successful at work, and fond of stylish clothing; their attitude towards women and love is distant; and they share a nationalistic and conservative worldview. Then, these common traits are discussed in the context of the generic qualities of romance and what they mean in terms of female readers’ fantasies.
Open Access
Imagi-nation of gendered nationalism : the represantation of women as gendered national subjects in Ottoman-Turkish novels (1908-1938)
(2005) Küçükalioğlu, Elif Gözdaşoğlu
The relation between gender and nationalism has been a controversial issue since the 1980’s when the feminist analyses have brought to light different ways in which women are implicated in nationalist projects. Although the feminist literature contains several insights about the significance and implications of women’s symbolic role in nationalist projects, the representation of women as gendered national subjects in cultural productions is not fully examined. The starting point for this study has been Anderson’s definition of nation as an imagined community according to which individuals imagine that they belong to same national collectivity in their minds. Even though Anderson talks about the member of the imagined community as gender free subject, it is obvious that each and every member of this community is imagined either as a male or a female subject. Being a female or male subject, in turn, affects the form of belonging to the imagined community. In this study, I examine the claim that gendered imagination determines the symbolic roles and meanings attributed to the membership of a collective identity, that is the nation. In order to understand the ongoing production of gendered nation in Anderson’s sense which is mainly realized in cultural domain, novels play a significant role in terms of representing the imagined boundaries and functioning as mediums through which cultural difference is expressed. As it is mentioned, the link between national formation and the novel is not accidental. The novel can be used as a place where different and conflicting problems are debated through the representation of some imaginary figures. The aim of this study is to examine the making of women as gendered national subjects in the novels in the preRepublican (Ottoman-Turkish) and early Republican period (1908-1938) by focusing on women’s images and to analyze the formation of gendered national identity. By examining women’s images in the novels, my objective is to identify some of the specific features of Turkish nationalism.
Open Access
Kemalist modernleşmenin adab-ı muaşeret romanları :popüler aşk anlatıları
(2005) Güneş, Aslı
Popular romances of the Republican Period, which are ignored while discussing the reverberations of the period of national construction, are deemed to be the texts relating the civic interpretation of the Kemalist modernization movement. In this sense, popular romances serve as pilots in the civic mobilization as the texts based on the most stylized interpretation of the “occidental rules of good manners” which are indispensable to lead the way to the creation of the civilized nation. The objective of this thesis is to examine the account of civilization resulting to be different from the interpretation of the canonic literature departing from Norbert Elias’s theory of civilization and the descriptions of the occidental genre of the Novel of Manners. The titles to be tackled as the Novel of Manners of the Kemalist modernization are You and I (1933), The Thunder of Love (1935) and The Endless Night (1938) by Muazzez Tahsin Berkand, Funda (1939) and Is That My Sin? (1939) by Kerime Nadir and Nedret (1938) by Güzide Sabri.
Open Access
Medeni ya da müslüman :popüler aşk romanlarında Feyza olmak
(2006) Erekli, Arzu
Popular romance narratives are usually neglected and regarded as a part of “low literature” in the literary discussions of Republican period. This study claims that these novels, in fact, provide significant data in the context of the construction of both Kemalist / civilized and muslim women’s identities in different periods and under dissimilar conditions. In the light of this assumption, this study aims at exploring the textual image of woman in the novels of Kerime Nadir (1917-1984) and Şûle Yüksel Şenler, entitled respectively Gelinlik Kız (1943), Saadet Tacı (1966), and Huzur Sokağı (1971). To this end, I adopted a comparative method on the base of gender relations in the novels and searched for an answer to the question of how status of woman in these relations was defined and / or determined by female authors. At this juncture, feminist readings of popular romance and thought provoking comments of the feminist literary critiques on women writers provided me with an instrumental perspective for the analysis of the novels. In this study, it is concluded that these two women writers, Kerime Nadir and Şûle Yüksel Şenler, producing novels in two different historical periods and seemed to be the agent of different ideologies with quite different narrative messages are promoting a common image of woman stemming from the similar narrative structure as well as parallel narrative codes. In addition to paying a special attention for determining the methods exploited by Nadir and Şenler for transmitting their ideological messages to readers, it is also revealed that the ideological preference of the author in question has a formative effect on the novels’ structure.