TURKISH NATIONAL IDENTITY AND ITS OTHERS: AN ANALYSIS OF THE EARLY REPUBLICAN NOVELS

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2022-10-26
Akcalı Yılmaz, Öznur
This thesis discusses the Turkish national identity building process in the early Republican period and just before, through the others of Turkish national identity. While doing this, three basic others of Turkish national identity were selected, namely the Western other, the Ottoman other, and the “non-Turkified others”, which is the concept developed in this thesis. The narratives about the selected others were analyzed on the novels written by Halide Edip Adıvar, Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, Reşat Nuri Güntekin and Peyami Safa, who were popular writers of the early Republican period, until 1950. First of all, it has been evaluated that literature can be a productive field of study in terms of international relations due to the many social and political narratives it contains. In addition, the concept of the other was considered as one of the constitutive elements of identity. In this thesis, which is based on a comprehensive text analysis and discourse analysis, it was emphasized that there were changes, contradictions and variations in the narrative of both Turkish national identity and others in the novels, even in the early Republican period. It is considered that instead of a homogeneous narration of the national identity construction the contradictions, diversity and changes in the narration of Turkish national identity and its others can provide a different understanding.

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Citation Formats
Ö. Akcalı Yılmaz, “TURKISH NATIONAL IDENTITY AND ITS OTHERS: AN ANALYSIS OF THE EARLY REPUBLICAN NOVELS,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2022.