Introduction: historical context and literary periods

An ongoing debate persists about the literary canon in Turkey. Does Turkey actually have such a canon? If so, what merits inclusion? What are the texts that might establish the canon? The debates are pertinent to this survey in that they attempt to describe not only the characteristics of literature in Turkey, but to catalogue the mix of figures, images and tropes at play in that literature. As a framework for a literary survey, the canon is useful for tracking a progression of genres and themes, for identifying local and foreign influences, and for revealing a projected ‘reader-citizen’. The audience of any canon is in one respect the ‘nation’, imagined or otherwise. Furthermore, as a body of texts that are models of form and content, the canon is one way to determine the changing cultural logic of a national tradition as well as the sites of its political and ideological power. (It hardly bears emphasis that literary production in Turkey is political.) In a context of traditional narratives transformed by European influences, the Ottoman and Turkish novel functioned to mediate contradictory forces and to open up new sites of identification. There is perhaps no better anthropological or aesthetic artefact with which to read social change, to gauge resistance and to trace the scars of history and ideology on local populations than the novel. In the process of ‘reading’ modernity, politics and the novel together, this survey compiles a running commentary of texts that constitute one possible canon of the Turkish novel.