Azade Seyhan's Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Modern Turkish Novel in a Comparative Context, second in the MLA series World Literatures Reimagined, offers a much-needed guide to the vast, underexplored territory of modern Turkish literature. Seyhan situates the Turkish novel in relation to such influences as the poetic and oral traditions of Ottoman Islamic culture, the early Turkish Republic, and Western Romantic and Enlightenment thought. She demonstrates that the evolution of the Turkish novel is inseparable from that of the Turkish state. Readers will discover a wealth of Turkish authors, from those with international renown, such as Ahmet Hamdi Tanp?nar and the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, to others less widely read. Among them are Re?sat Nuri Guentekin, whose Autobiography of a Turkish Girl prompted thousands of young Turkish women to seek teaching posts; Halide Edib Ad?var, who envisioned a harmonious coexistence of Islamic spirituality with Western ideals; Aziz Nesin, Turkey's master humorist, who instructs the reader in censor-resistant code; and Ya?sar Kemal and Adalet A?ao?lu and their blendings of myth, memory, and politics. Appendixes provide a chronology, a pronunciation guide to Turkish, and a list of modern Turkish novels in English translation, preparing readers to embark on further exploration.
Azade Seyhan is the Fairbank Professor in the Humanities, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Affiliated Faculty in Philosophy and in Middle East Studies at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism; Writing Outside the Nation; and Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Modern Turkish Novel in a Comparative Context.
"An excellent resource for comparative literature, Turkish and Middle Eastern literature courses." --Choice "A stunning achievement. This book should be a major contribution to the teaching of world literature. Seyhan has, I believe, 'reimagined' the Turkish novel in a way that makes it accessible to classrooms." --Walter G. Andrews, University of Washington "[O]ccasions to call a study a landmark tend to be rare . . . [Seyhan's volume] without any doubt deserves this predicate. It not only "offers a much-needed guide to the vast, underexplored territory of modern Turkish literature" . . . but is actually the first one to do so comprehensively and on an academic level in a western language since the publication of Bombaci's Storia [and] is the very first of its kind to appear in English. . . . The author is excellently equipped for this project. [Her approach] is an excellent way to appeal to non-specialists and to make Turkish literature "readable" for them. . . . The book is full of inspiring and useful insights. [I] use the book in class [and] recommend it both to students of Middle Eastern literature and of World Literature, both beginners and advanced." --Stephan Guth, Middle Eastern Literatures
