Ahmet Mithat Efendi ve Beşir Fuat'a göre gerçekçilik

Mithat Efendi (1844-1912) and Beşir Fuat (1852-1887) by focusing on their articles and letters on the subject. It is usual to study the development of realism in Turkish literature by only taking the novels into account. However, articles are a valuable source of information in order to understand how realism was interpreted by Ottoman writers. The texts focused on in this thesis are the newspaper articles and letters of Ahmet Mithat Efendi and Beşir Fuat, who developed opposing views on realism. These articles and letters were mostly published during the 1880s and 1890s. Ahmet Mithat Efendi rejected realism both on aesthetic and non-aesthetic grounds. Yet, it has also been noted that he used the concept of “verisimilitude” and asserted that a novel should seem to be true even if it was imaginary. One other important aspect of Ahmet Mithat’s interpretation of realism is his effort to appropriate and adapt it to the Ottoman context. On the other hand, it has been indicated that Beşir Fuat’s approach to literary realism is just the opposite of Ahmet Mithat’s. Beşir Fuat, who criticizes romanticism, classical Ottoman poetry and the role of imagination in literature underlines the necessity that a writer should work like a historian or a sociologist. He is also against elaborate language and states that the primary aim of the literary language is to transmit ideas to the reader in a clear and exact way. It has been concluded that there is not only one interpretation of realism in Ottoman literature at the end of the nineteenth century. The fact that the writers of the period did not simply imitate their French contemporaries and tried to transform their conception of realism is also within the conclusions that have been reached.