Kasaba R. The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 4, Turkey in the Modern World

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the phrases ‘Muslim nationalism’ and ‘secular Islam’. The challenge for sub-

sequent generations was to try to manage such contradictions through new

political and cultural syntheses.

‘East versus West’ debates regarding tradition and reform are reﬂected in

the works of Ottoman Turkist writers such as Ziya G

okalp,

Omer Seyfet-

tin, Halide Edip Adıvar and M

uﬁde Ferit Tek. The nascent cultural Turkism

movement began to grow and gain momentum against the backdrop of early

twentieth-century non-Muslim secession movements. Rather than trying to

accommodate the ‘West’, author-intellectuals of this period for the ﬁrst time

fully recognised the dark side of European culture in Western imperial and

colonial aims. In turn, resistance gradually became an individual, social and

political imperative. Intellectuals guided the populace through novels that

demonstrated new narrative identities.

Under the inﬂuence of ZiyaG

okalp’sTurkist thought, late Ottoman Muslim

social engineering included calls for the creation of a ‘New language’ based

on a simpliﬁcation of the written idiom and the involvement of women in

education and public life. The possibility of an alphabet change to Latin and

the transfer of the capital to Anatolia were ﬁrst expressed in this period. These

suggestions were contested, however, as some argued for the persistence of

tradition in culture and literature. Realism based in recent historical events

gave rise to a new identiﬁcation based on ethno-religious and geographical

realities as the territories of the Ottoman state contracted to majority Muslim

regions and then to Anatolia. With the Greek invasion of western Anatolia

in 1919, Turkist nationalism grew even stronger. The battle of Sakarya (1921)

marked a decisive victory for Anatolian nationalists and the death knell of the

Ottoman government in Istanbul. Organisations such as the Turkish Hearths

(whoseleading members included Ziya G

okalp,Yusuf Akc¸ura, Ahmet A

gao

glu

and Hamdullah Suphi Tanrı

over) and journals such as Genc¸ Kalemler (Young

Literati) and T

urk Yurdu (Turkish Homeland) spread the ideals of a Turkist-

Muslim culture that would revitalise the late Ottoman state or create a nation-

state in its stead.

Traditional literary histories include in this period movements such as the

Fecr-i Ati (The Coming Dawn, 1909–13) and the Milli Edebiyat (National Liter-

ature, 1911–23) schools. The Coming Dawn, led by thinkers such as Ali Canib

and Ahmet Has¸im, espoused an individualist ‘art for art’s sake’ stance and the

National Literature school led by

Omer Seyfettin and Halide Edip advocated

engagement with national-social realities. The National Literature movement

emphasised Muslim–Turkish identiﬁcation, but not yet secular identity. These

groups emerged at a time when the ‘Young Turks’ moved from being an

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The novel in Turkish

opposition party to an authoritarian party in power (1913). The Constitutional

Revolution of 1908 and the quashing of the 1909 counter-revolution ushered

in a period of false optimism for modernisers of the Muslim state. The estab-

lishment of a constitutional sultanate was not enough to prevent continued

European control over Ottoman territories. Ultimately the response became

more desperate and extreme, leading to a variety of nationalism that itself

intimated the partition of the Ottoman Empire.

Turkist social nationalism (1922–49):

national allegories

This era witnessed the proliferation of ideological novels; that is, historically

grounded representations of new ‘men’ and new societies with a socialist,

nationalist and/or Turkist colouring. Often, one of the main characters can

be read as a clear allegory for the nation or collective itself. For example,

most of the protagonists of Yakup Kadri Karaosmano

glu’s novels advocate

a national Turkist idealism. His Nur Baba (1922) is an ideologically informed

popular novel that ridicules the practices of suﬁ brotherhoods, in this case

a Bektas¸i shaykh and his followers. Within a few years of its publication,

the Kemalist government would outlaw all dervish lodges, forcing suﬁsm in

the Turkish context underground. The novel is signiﬁcant in that it antici-

pates some of the transformations of the Turkist cultural revolution (1922–38),

and it targets Islam as being inimical to modernisation. The politicisation

of Islamic symbols and everyday ritual practice marks this period of literary

4 Principal authors and representative works:

Yakup Kadri Karaosmano

glu (1889–1974), Nur Baba, 1922

Erc

ument Ekrem Talu (1888–1956), Kan ve

Iman (Blood and Faith), 1925

Sadri Ertem (1898–1943), C¸ ıkrıklar Durunca (When the Looms Stop), 1930

Peyami Safa (1899–1961), Fatih–Harbiye (Fatih and Harbiye), 1931

Yakup Kadri Karaosmano

glu (1889–1974), Yaban (The Outsider), 1932

Burhan Cahit Morkaya (1892–1949), Y

uzbas¸ı Cel

al (Captain Cel

al), 1933

Memduh S¸evket Esendal (1885–1952), Ayas¸lı ve Kiracıları (Ayas¸lı and his Tenants), 1934

Sabahattin Ali (1907–48), Kuyucaklı Yusuf (Yusuf of Kuyucak), 1937

Mithat Cemal Kuntay (1885–1956),

Uc¸ Istanbul (Istanbul Triptych), 1938

Ismayıl Hakkı Baltacıo

glu (1886–1978), Hayatım (My Life), 1938–41, memoirs

Nihal Atsız (1905–75), Dalkavuklar Gecesi (Night of Sycophants), 1941

Abd

ulhak S¸inasi Hisar (1887–1963), Fahim Bey ve Biz (Fahim Bey and Us), 1941

Suat Dervis¸(1905–72), Fosforlu Cevriye (Phosphorescent Jevriye), 1945–6

S¸

ufe Nihal Bas¸ar (1896–1973), Domanic¸Da

glarının Yolcusu (Traveller of the Domanic¸

Mountains), 1946

Saﬁye Erol (1900–64), Ci

gerdelen (Ci

gerdelen on the Danube), 1947

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–62), A Mind at Peace (Huzur), 1949

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production. In the novel, the main character, Nur Baba, is portrayed as a

charlatan interested in his own pleasures. The mostly wealthy women who

come to him end up losing their wealth and themselves to his power. It is

by seducing women that he becomes a shaykh, attains wealth and forces one

Nig

ar Hanım to leave her husband, children and place in society in joining

him. In a matter of years, Nur Baba abandons her to marry a younger woman.

The novel implies that such characters will persist in exploiting members of

society unless they are stopped. In short, the novel argues for the drastic mea-

sures witnessed in the Republican cultural revolution. Here, as with previous

novels, women, their freedom and contribution to social life are the gauges of

modernity.

Over a period of decades,the national allegories of novels written in the 1920s

and 1930s by Yakup Kadri, Peyami Safa and Halide Edip gradually gave way to

more nuanced accounts. In Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s work, the reader is con-

fronted not with object lessons, morality or didactic ‘party’ novels espousing

the Kemalist vision of society and history, but with a complex reckoning of the

transition between Ottoman and Turkist states. In the milestone modernist

novel A Mind at Peace (Huzur, 1949), the historical traumas experienced between

1908 and 1938 have become psychological dilemmas that afﬂict the upper-class

characters. Rather than providing an indictment of traditional Islamic prac-

tices as many Turkist writers do, Tanpınar bears witness to the loss of lifestyles

and articulates a web of narrative memory threatened with oblivion through

cultural revolution (locally) and war (externally). The two novels bookend

this period of reform and social engineering, the former through ideological

zeal and the latter by dramatising the great socio-political and psychological

burden of those who have experienced a loss of empire and a marginalisa-

tion of Istanbul cosmopolitanism. A Mind at Peace is an aesthetically complex

novel structured in four parts reﬂecting lament, melancholy, elation and the

‘dark night of the soul’. M

umtaz, the protagonist, is a young man whose

parents died during the Graeco-Ottoman war of 1919–22 and who was raised

in the household of his cousin

Ihsan, a history teacher. M

umtaz works as

an assistant in the department of literature of Galatasaray Lyc

ee after receiv-

ing his degree from the same department. The tragic novel characterises his

mental breakdown under the weight of the illness of his cousin and mentor

Ihsan, of the ending of his relationship with his girlfriend Nuran, of the sui-

cide of his nemesis Suad (who also loves Nuran) and of the impending world

war in Europe. In its depiction of Istanbul’s streets, neighbourhoods and the

Bosporus, the novel is an icon of modernist, cosmopolitan prose. The leitmotifs

of urban Turkish culture, including the architecture of Istanbul and traditional

486

The novel in Turkish

Ottoman music, add a dimension of cultural nationalism that is a ﬁrst for the

novel in Turkish. A Mind at Peace also is one of the ﬁrst testimonies of the

shortcomings of the national and social modernisation projects of the 1920s

and 1930s.

Developing from the cultural Turkism of the previous era, this period of

Turkist social nationalism emphasised the political and social realities of Euro-

pean injustice, war and poverty to give rise to a variety of Turkism that moved

from the cultural to the political and psychological realms. Vast state mobili-

sation for the promotion of a national identity based in Turkism began. Three

events that marked the start of the Turkist cultural revolution were especially

inﬂuential in removing religion and religious symbols from the public arena:

the abolition of the Ottoman sultanate (1922); the declaration of the Republic

and the transfer of the capital from Istanbul to Ankara (1923); and the abolition

of the caliphate (1924). ‘Separation of religion and state’ became a guiding prin-

ciple as secularism was valorised as the ideology that would bring the greatest

progress to war-torn Anatolia and the greatest pride to its people. Novels such

as Yakup Kadri’s Nur Baba and Res¸at Nuri G

untekin’s Yes¸il Gece (Green Night,

1928) ridiculed religion and suﬁ brotherhoods, portraying Islamic traditions,

rather orientalistically, as being inimical to women’s rights and a principal

obstacle to modernisation.

The Turkist cultural revolution, with its many reforms and its successes

and failures, is a major theme that emerges in texts of this era with an often

didactic character. The crises of the cultural duality (modernity versus tra-

dition; individual versus nation; religion versus secularism) that appeared in

earlier periods persists here through romantic allegories (‘national romances’)

that explore the dilemma of orientalised and nationalised individuals and their

changing identities. The positive hero or heroine is usually an urban individ-

ual who surrenders to the national-social collective and accepts the ideals of a

national utopia based in Anatolia as in Halide Edip’s The Shirt of Flame (Ates¸ten

omlek, 1922) and Yakup Kadri’s Sodom and Gomorrah (Sodom ve Gomore, 1928).

However, national ‘distopic’ themes begin to quickly follow suit as subtexts

in novels of nationalisation or as developed narratives in their own right. Such

themes might focus on the rift between devoted revolutionary intellectuals

and Anatolian villagers (as in Yakup Kadri’s Yaban (The Outsider, 1932)), the

patriarchal system that puts women involved in public or educational work

at risk of harm or death (Halide Edip’s Vurun Kahpeye (Strike the Whore,

1926)) and the great psychic risks of denying the recent Ottoman cultural past

including the traditions of Islam (Tanpınar’s Sahnenin Dıs¸ındakiler (Behind the

Scenes, 1950)).

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With the alphabet reform of 1928/9, literary works no longer appeared

in Ottoman script and began to be published in the Latin alphabet

for the ﬁrst time. The ensuing language reform began extensive corpus

planning of Turkish, ostensibly to make it easier to acquire and render it

more accessible to the populace. It also created an epistemological barrier

between the cultural heritage of the Ottoman state and Islam and the newly

established Republic. New nationalised generations would hence have little

or no textual access to the recent Ottoman-Islamic past. This era also saw

the establishment of the Turkish Language Society (1932) and the Turkish

Historical Society (1935) whose efforts in creating ‘pure Turkish’ and rewrit-

ing history from an ethno-national Turkist perspective helped institutionalise

Turkist thought and identity. The Village Institutes were established in 1938 to

educate those in rural areas. Writers such as Mehmet Bas¸aran, Talip Apaydın,

Fakir Baykurt, and Mahmut Makal, who would be inﬂuential in the next gen-

eration, emerged out of these schools. The Village Institutes were closed in

1947 in the context of the rise of the Cold War.

This period witnessed the emergence of cultural groups such as the Kadro

(Cadre)intellectual movement to systematise Kemalism and the Yedi Mes¸aleler

(Seven Torches) and Garip (Strange) schools of poetry. Generally, the ﬁction

of this era valorises the sacriﬁce of individuals and intellectuals for the cause

of the national-social collective. An ideal (whether it is national, ethical or

moral) and the confounding realities that prevent its manifestation are always

present in these works. Characters are deemed worthy to the degree that they

aspire to these ideals. The texts themselves are didactic and aim to create a

nationalised readership. The intellectual symbolises a go-between between

outside world and local populace with the interests of that populace always

being paramount. As representations, these works clearly function as part of

a cultural economy that is driven by the Turkish state. The state emerges as

a force of censorship and control, especially against a perceived leftist threat

and extreme fascist tendencies of nationalism, beginning a long tradition of

conﬂict with writers, many of whom spent considerable time in jail or in

exile.

A Turkist national master narrative, supported by the state, emerges early

in this period. This master narrative is comprised of four plot-points: colonial

encounter; Anatolian turn; collective consciousness; and cultural revolution.

This emplotment can be traced in many of the works of this period and the

following periods. Aspects of it are present in later ‘postmodern’ works as

well. As is evident by new historical novels such as Turgut

Ozakman’s S¸u

C¸ ılgın T

urkler (Those Crazy Turks, 2004) and Attil

Ilhan’s Gazi Pas¸a (2005),

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The novel in Turkish

the national master narrative has resurfaced in the twenty-ﬁrst century as a

form of ‘neo-Kemalism’ in reaction to the Justice and Development Party, the

rule of the Erdo

gan administration, the threat to national identity caused by

the demands of EU accession and the decentring trends of neo-liberalism. It is

ironic that today this movement is somewhat reactionary, as opposed to being

relatively progressive, as it was in the 1920s and 1930s.

The era of secular Turkism is tempered by the transition from monoparty

to multi-party politics (1946) and the loss of power by Atat

urk’s party in the 1950

elections. This blow to authoritarian nationalism in the wake of the Second

World War also saw the ﬁrst early attempts at socialist realism represented by

Sadri Ertem, Sabahattin Ali, N

azım Hikmet and Suat Dervis¸ – whose works

forecast the dominant trends of the mid-century in the context of the Cold

War.

Anatolian socialist realism (1950–70): village novels

The novel began as a cosmopolitan, urban form in the Ottoman Turkish con-

text. With the establishment of the Republic, Anatolia and its people became

5 Principal authors and representative works:

azım Hikmet Ran (1901–63), Human Landscapes from my Country (Memleketimden

Insan

Manzaraları), written 1941–6, published 1966–7

Sait Faik Abasıyanık (1906–54), Kayıp Aranıyor (Missing Person), 1953

Orhan Kemal (1914–70), Bereketli Topraklar

Uzerine (On Bountiful Land), 1954

Peride Cel

al (b. 1915),

Uc¸ Kadının Romanı (A Novel of Three Women), 1954

Yas¸arKemalG

okc¸eli (b. 1923), Mehmed, my Hawk (

Ince Mehmed), 1955

Necip Fazıl Kısak

urek (1905–83), Cinnet Mustatili (Rectangle of Madness), 1955, prison

memoirs

Ilhan Tarus (1907–67), Yes¸ilkaya Savcısı (The Yes¸ilkaya Public Prosecutor), 1955

Nahit Sırrı

Orik (1895–1960), Sultan Hamid D

us¸erken (As Sultan Hamit was Deposed),

1957

Talip Apaydın (b. 1926), Sarı Trakt

or (Yellow Tractor), 1958

Fakir Baykurt (1929–99), Yılanların

u (The Snakes’ Revenge), 1959

Nezihe Meric¸(b.1924), Korsan C¸ ıkmazı (Pirate Dead End), 1961

Attil

Ilhan (1925–2005), Kurtlar Sofrası (A Feast of Wolves), 1963

Tarık Bu

gra (1918–94), K

uc¸

uk A

ga (Little Agha), 1963

amiha Ayverdi (1905–93),

Ibrahim Efendi Kona

gı (The

Ibrahim Effendi Estate), 1964

Sevim Burak (1931–83), Yanık Saraylar (Burned Palaces), 1965, stories

Kemal Bilbas¸ar (1910–83), Cemo (Jemo), 1966

Hekimo

glu

Ismail (b. 1932), Minyeli Abdullah (Abdullah of Minye, Egypt), 1967

Kemal T

ahir Demir (1910–73), Devlet Ana (Mother State), 1967

Aziz Nesin (1916–95), S¸imdiki C¸ ocuklar Harika (Kids These Days are Wonderful), 1967

Halikarnas Balıkc¸ısı /CevatS¸akirKabaa

gac¸lı(1890–1973), Deniz Gurbetc¸ileri(SeaExiles),

1969

Mehmet Bas¸aran (b. 1926), S

urg

unler (Exiles), 1970

Demirtas¸Ceyhun(b.1934), Asya (Asia), 1970

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an increasingly important area that began to engage the interest of intellectu-

als and entered the plots of novels. As mentioned, early attempts at depicting

Anatolia were achieved by Res¸at Nuri G

untekin (Autobiography of a Turkish

Girl) and Sabahattin Ali (Kuyucaklı Yusuf (Yusuf of Kuyucak, 1937). However,

true ‘Anatolian consciousness’ did not manifest until the spread of socialist

ideals, which had a great inﬂuence in Turkey during the Cold War.

A privileged Istanbulite-turned-poet-of-the-people, N

azım Hikmet’s Human

Landscapes from my Country (Memleketimden

Insan Manzarları, 1939–50)isanovel

in free verse that attempts to capture the multidimensionality of Anatolia

through the plot of a train journey from Istanbul. Hikmet’s work was banned,

thought it circulated samizdat-fashion to reach its audience. In 1965, posthu-

mously, his works began to be published openly. Hikmet’s style and vocabulary

mimics his ideals; he aestheticises the speech of the commoner and eschews

formal metre and rhyme. His subject matter moves from the dispossessed to

the wealthy, from prostitutes and criminals to industrialists and bankers. The

‘journey in’ was made by intellectuals from Istanbul in the past, but none pre-

sented the country with the expository and poetic power of Hikmet. Human

Landscapes is semi-autobiographical and contains historical vignettes between

1908 and 1950, including the First World War, the Turkish War of Independence

and the Second World War. The epic work, relyingon techniques of montage in

parts, follows the main character, a political prisoner named Hilmi. Book One

describes the villagers, workers, ofﬁcials, gendarmes, convicts, unemployed

and homeless embarking on a train that is leaving Haydarpas¸a railway station

in Istanbul. Book Two describes politicians, journalists, entrepreneurs and vet-

erans of the War of Independence embarking on an express train leaving the

same station, most of whom are travelling in couchettes. Book Three reveals

the predicaments of the writer Hilmi, who is on the ﬁrst train and has been

convicted for being a communist, in various prisons and hospitals where he is

seeking treatment for a worsening eye condition that threatens to leave him

blind. Book Four addresses the Second World War, describing aggressors, resis-

tance movements, patriots, compradors, feudal landlords and peasants. Book

Five returns to the poet Hilmi, focusing on his suffering, desires and the letters

he receives from his wife while he remains incarcerated. Anatolia appears in

this work through vignettes that describe around 300 different people; together

they constitute an indictment of nation-states whose exploited people are suf-

fering from a variety of injustices while a select minority live lives of privilege.

Human Landscapes is one of the sacred texts of Turkish letters and a model of

form for both poets and writers. The verse-novel is also important, not least

because it reveals the power of colloquialisms, the spoken language of the

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The novel in Turkish

common man, and addresses a recurring theme in Turkish letters: the ‘prison

narrative’.

While socialist realism had many facets, focusing on dialects, oral narrative

traditions and the everyday lives of various regions of Anatolia, it was not

until the work of Kemal T

ahir that this genre was historicised and applied

innovatively to the Ottoman past. In his famous novel Devlet Ana (Mother

State, 1967), T

ahir combines the Turkish literary tradition of Anatolian social-

ist realism with what might be termed socialist idealism. While focusing on

the geographical, economic and social conditions prevailing in pre-Ottoman

Anatolia and giving intimate accounts of the lives of both commoners and key

historical ﬁgures, he weaves a chauvinistic argument for the Ottomans (and

Turks) as being model and just state builders. Combining Anatolian realism,

the Marxist belief in the Asiatic mode of production and strains of Turkism,

ahir introduces a new understanding of historiography into the socialist real-

ist novel. The novel has two main storylines: the establishment of the Ottoman

state by the S

ut Turks; and a story of revenge and initiation about Kerim

Can, whose older brother has been murdered. The socio-political and individ-

ual stories are intertwined. The novel is optimistic: it describes how Ertu

grul,

his son Osman (founder of the Ottoman dynasty) and his grandson Orhan

sowed the seeds of the Ottoman state in north-western Anatolia between the

faltering Byzantine and Seljuk empires while Kerim Can fulﬁls the will of his

mother, Baci Bey, and gets his just revenge against European enemies Notus

Gladius and Uranha. Focusing on the geographical, economic and social condi-

tions that gave rise to the Ottoman Anatolian (and, by extension, the Turkish

Republican Anatolian) state, Devlet Ana is inﬂuenced by Fernand Braudel’s

thought and the Annales school of history, which emphasised long periods

and mentalities/attitudes as it intersected with Marxism. T

ahir in this way put

forth a ‘deep’ interpretation of history, an alternative to the superﬁcial versions

espoused by Turkist modernisers. His thesis is that Ottoman society was class-

less, unlike European models, and that progressive state formation was among

the greatest legacies of the Ottomans. The plot focuses on the establishment

of the Ottoman state after the dissolution of the Seljuk state around 1300,

which however is an allegory for the establishment of a trans-national socialist

state accepting a variety of people, languages and religions in the present.

ahir provides an example of historiographic socialist realism that breaks a

Republican taboo by demonstrating the pertinence of the Ottoman past to

present-day Turkey. The fact that both Hikmet and T

ahir were imprisoned

for their socialist beliefs gives an indication of the strong opposition between

nationalist and socialist versions of Turkish Republican culture.

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As in other periods, the movement of Anatolian socialist realism was fuelled

by national and international developments. The start of multi-party politics

in 1946 and the election of the Democrat Party to power in 1950 contained an

implicit critique of the Republican People’s Party and the Turkist cultural rev-

olution that was reﬂected in literature through a move away from nationalist

ideals, focusing on elite intellectuals, to socialist ideals, focusing on the Anato-

lian peasant. For the ﬁrst time, writers en masse began to focus on characters

and settings outside Istanbul and the major urban centres. The inﬂuence of

Soviet socialist realism, the re-opening of the People’s Houses (Halkevleri) in

1961 to help educate those living in rural areas and the 1960 coup that led to the

adoption of a socially progressive constitution all played their part in affecting

Turkish literature.

Author-intellectuals including N

azım Hikmet, Kemal T

ahir, Orhan Kemal,

Ilhan Tarus, Yas¸ar Kemal, Talip Apaydın, Fakir Baykurt and Tarık Bu

gra estab-

lished the genre of the ‘village novel’ that advocated social justice for the

dispossessed. Some of the more provocative examples of the village novel

merged with other genres such as the Ottoman historical novel and the bandit

(es¸kiya) trope. Thisperiod also gave rise to reassessments of the War of Indepen-

dence and to the ﬁrst novels with overtly Islamic themes: Hekimo

glu

Ismail’s

ﬁrst novel, Minyeli Abdullah (Abdullah from Minye), considered to be the van-

guard of the Islamist novel (hidayet romanı), was later made into a popular

ﬁlm.

This period focuses on the injustices suffered by the peasants of Anato-

lia in novels that pit innocent victims against opportunistic oppressors. The

genre, often historically grounded and based on the use of actual documents,

addresses bleak economic hardships, blood feuds, patriarchy, honour, outlaws

and the cruelty of gendarmes, petty ofﬁcials and exploitation by landowners

gas). Protagonists, victims of exploitation, are brought to the point of rebel-

lion, seeking revenge, justice and honour. Many works, formulaic in character

and ideologically informed, are allegories of social revolution and rebellion.

Settings are mostly agrarian villages, towns and the rural countryside. Local

oral narratives including myths, legends, epic tales, folk literature and

as¸ık min-

strel accounts are incorporated into plots, as in Yas¸ar Kemal’s works. Local

dialects are often represented. Many works reﬂect a strong inﬂuence of Soviet

socialist realism, and praxis is championed over poetics and aesthetics. Like-

wise, social and class conﬂict takes precedence over individual concerns and

inner psychological conﬂict. Works contain an implicit critique of cultural

revolution as incomplete in developing the country and of little consequence

to those living outside cities and towns.

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The novel in Turkish

The 1960 coup, valorised by the left as ending an era of overly national-

istic authoritarian rule, and the new constitution, established wide-ranging

freedom of the press, an independent judiciary, the right to form unions and

autonomy in universities reinforced a socialist context and kept alive the pos-

sibility of social freedoms and justice. However, the village novel, meant to

confront the realities of rural life, became formulaic and idealised as well,

later leading to an emergence of individual concerns in the following gener-

ation, especially by female authors frustrated with marginalisation. Nezihe

Meric¸ and Sevim Burak represent those who helped establish an early feminist

realism that took root after the 1971 military coup.

Existentialism and feminism (1971–80):

marginalised voices

guz Atay’s Tutunamayanlar (Dispossessed, 1973) is one of the ﬁrst novels

in Turkey that self-consciously demonstrates meta-narrative elements. The

‘inter-coup’ era was a socially fragile period that saw intellectuals removed

6 Principal authors and representative works:

S¸ule Y

uksel S¸enler (b. 1938), Huzur Soka

gı (Serenity Street), 2 vols., 1970–3

guzAtay(1934–77), Tutunamayanlar (Dispossessed), 1971

Leyl

a Erbil (b. 1931), Tuhaf bir Kadın (A Strange Woman), 1971

Hasan

Izzettin Dinamo (1909–89), Kutsal Barıs¸ (Sacred Peace), 7 vols., 1971–6

C¸ etin Altan (b. 1927), B

uk G

ozaltı (A Long Incarceration), 1972

Ahmet G

unbay Yıldız (b. 1943), C¸ic¸ekler Susayınca (When Flowers Thirst), 1972

Adalet A

gao

glu (b. 1929),

Olmeye Yatmak (Lying Down to Die), trilogy, 1973

Yusuf Atılgan (1921–89), Motherland Hotel (Anayurt Oteli), 1973

Necati Cumalı (1921–2001), Acı T

un (Bitter Tobacco), 1974

Orhan Duru (b. 1933), A

gır

Is¸c¸iler (Hard Workers), 1974 stories

uruzan (b. 1938), 47’liler (Generation of ’47 ), 1974

Emine Is¸ınsu (b. 1938), Cambaz (Acrobat), 1974

useyin Karatay (b. 1937), S

urg

gretmen (Exiled Teacher), 1974

Erdal

Oz (b. 1935), Yaralısın (You’re Wounded), 1974

Sevgi Soysal (1936–76), S¸afak (The Dawn), 1975

Vedat T

urkali (b. 1919), Bir G

un Tek Bas¸ına (One Day All Alone), 1975

Ismet

Ozel (b. 1944), Cinayetler Kitabı (A Book of Crimes), 1975, poetry

Selim

Ileri (b. 1949), Her Gece Bodrum (Bodrum Each Night), trilogy, 1976

Samim Kocag

oz (1916–93), Tartıs¸ma (The Argument), 1976

Ferit Edg

u(b.1936), O/Hakk

ari’de Bir Mevsim (He, a.k.a. A Season in Hakk

ari), 1977

Bilge Karasu (1930–95), The Garden of Departed Cats (G

oc¸m

us¸ Kediler Bahc¸esi), 1979

Demir

Ozl

u(b.1935), Bir K

uc¸

uk Burjuvanın Genc¸lik Yılları (The Youth of a Petite Bourgeois),

1979

Pınar K

ur (b. 1943), Asılacak Kadın (A Condemned Woman), 1979

Hulki Aktunc¸(b.1949), Bir C¸a

g Yangını (TheFireofanAge), 1980

Mustafa Miyaso

glu (b. 1946), D

onemec¸ (Turning Point), 1980

Bekir Yıldız (1933–98), Halkalı K

ole (Ringed Slave), 1980

493