Turkish romance fiction and world literature through the case of Nihal Yeğinobalı

Abstract

This thesis examines the oeuvre of Nihal Yeğinobalı whose literary output as a translator and a novelist stretches from the 1950s to the 2000s. Each chapter of the thesis offers close readings on one of her six novels and discusses the ways in which Yeğinobalı employs generic tropes found in romance novels and gothic novels. It aims to bring the first years of Yeğinobalı’s career when he wrote under the pseudonym of an American man Vincent Ewing with her works from later years when she wrote under her own name. Theoretically based on Wai-Chee Dimock’s concept of “Genre as World Literature”, this thesis considers Nihal Yeğinobalı as a part of world literary canon especially with regards to her kinship with the female tradition. It explores and builds thematic and formal connections between Yeğinobalı’s work and the work of novelists such as Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Margaret Mitchell, and Doris Lessing. Yeğinobalı’s career offers a rare subject of analysis as she constantly moved between author/translator, American/Turkish, female/male. In her attempts to surmount gendered prejudices in publication; her novels transformed; changed nationalities and revealed shifts in notions of womanhood, social responsibility, and sexuality throughout 20th century Turkey.