| Summary: | This dissertation comparatively examines twentieth-century Turkish and Anglo-European novels to illuminate the how modernism functions as a vital, but theoretically neglected, paradigm for understanding the development of the Turkish novel. Building on the insights of the global turn in modernist scholarship, I argue that the Turkish novel in the early 20th century offers unique insight into the relationship between state-sponsored, westernizing modernity and literary experimentation. Exploring important novels of the Kemalist era alongside their equally canonical Anglo-European counterparts, this dissertation demonstrates that certain tropes of modernism long presumed unique to European culture have analogous strands in Turkish modernity. By connecting literary innovation in Turkey to the larger discourse of modernism globally, this research forges a model of literary connection predicated on European and Middle Eastern cultural exchange outside of the postcolonial model, and reshapes critical understanding of the Turkish novel as belated vis-à-vis Europe. Organized into four chapters, each chapter compares a pairing of Anglo-European and Ottoman-Turkish authors and addresses debates central to the definitions of literary modernism to which both Turkish and Anglo-European modernism contribute. To this end, I pair Halide Edip Adıvar and Virginia Woolf to address debates over the gender of modernism; Nezihe Muhiddin and Rebecca West in reference to the divide between modernism and mass literature; Peyami Safa and Wyndham Lewis to examine how conservative ideology interacts with Bergsonian philosophy to shape modernist form; and finally, I turn to Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar and James Joyce to address questions about modernism's relationship to the literary tradition. These pairings allow me to examine and explore how debates on gender, conservative ideology, mass fiction, and the literary tradition are put to cultural work in Turkey and England, and to illuminate important convergences in literary modernism on the Turkish-British Axis.
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