Gazavâtnâme türünün romans-epikten biyografiye dönüşümü

Abstract

Because war and heroic deeds constitute the main themes of gazavâtnâmes, they are classified as epic narratives in the Turkish literary canon. Gazavâtnâmes were applied for shedding light on the foundation process of the Ottoman Empire by prominent scholars such as Paul Wittek, the pioneer of them. These narratives became the primary sources of the Ottoman historiography, therefore their fictional and aesthetic characteristics, and relationship with the tradition of oral storytelling were neglected for a long time. In this dissertation, the prose manuscripts of Battalnâme, Dânişmendnâme, Saltuknâme and Gazavât-ı Hayreddin Paşa were analysed with a comparative literary approach and the similarities and differences between the narrative structures of the four texts were revealed. The similarities between motifs, characters and plots of the four narratives constitute the focal point of this attempt of comparative reading. The revealing of these parallelisms in the narrative structure of the four manuscripts makes easier to find out the epic and romance characteristics of them. The intertextual figures and motifs found in Battalnâme, Dânişmendnâme and Saltuknâme demonstrate that gazavâtnâme narrators were influenced from Arabic and Persian epic narratives. Therefore in this dissertation the literary relationship between these texts with Arabic and Persian epic narratives such as Şehnâme and Zü’l-himme was searched through intertextual references. In this thesis, the similarities of the gazavâtnâme genre with epic and romance, originally European literary genres, were discussed. However this way of comparison was suggested only as an alternative critical viewpoint. The aim of this comparative attempt of reading was to demonstrate the romance-epic characteristics of Battalnâme, Saltuknâme and Dânişmendnâme and the emergence of biographical characteristics in Gazavât-ı Hayreddin Paşa, which was asserted as a transformation of the genre.