Fictionalised history : identity, nationalism and nation-building in late Ottoman and early Republican Turkish novels

Nationalism in Turkey was an evolutionary process which took place during the final stages of the Ottoman Empire, the War of Independence and the Republican period. This transitional process was heavily influenced by the intellectuals and writers of the age, especially in the literature that they produced. Literature was a critical platform for nurturing and even propagating new ideologies such as nationalism, Westernization and even feminism. Literature was also the vehicle for transporting and transmitting such ideologies to the general public, as well as being an educational tool for warning people about the representation and misinterpretation of such ideological underpinnings of the new nation-state of Turkey. This dissertation examines some of the most critical literary novels from the period, written by some of the most influential intellectuals, such as Halide Edib Adivar, Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoglu and Resat Nuri Guntekin, in order to understand the evolution of Turkish nationalism as well as the reconstruction of Turkish national and cultural identity.