Efforts to Modernize Chapbooks during the Initial Years of the Turkish Republic.

Chapbook reform was part and parcel of larger projects of folk culture reform in Europe between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Political powers excised content perceived as dangerous and substituted material reflecting their own principles and aims. This article examines the reflections of this process in Turkey. The modernization of chapbooks was carried out by the Turkish political authorities as a state project only in 1937. That project included the transformation of traditional heroes and events in these chapbooks to place them in line with the Republican revolution and the state ideology of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]