Health, Literature and Women in Twentieth-Century Turkey

"Health, Literature and Gender in Twentieth Century Turkey offers readers fresh insight into Turkish modernity and its discourse on health, what it excludes, and how these potentialities manifest themselves in fiction to shape the imagination of the period. Following the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the newly founded Turkish Republic of the twentieth century set out to define itself as a healthy, fit and robust nation, rising from the remains of the 'sick man of Europe'. This volume aims to illuminate this nationalist rhetoric as an important political tool used by the Republic to showcase its success, to invent clear connections with Europe and to highlight themselves as a healthy and young nation at the expense of sick individuals. Examining representations of health and illness in nationalist romances, melodramas, and modernist works, this book will explore disabilities and diseases such as syphilis, tuberculosis and cancer, and their representation in the literary imagination as a tool to discuss anxieties over cultural transformation. This volume places Turkish literature in the field of health humanities for the first time, proves the case of Turkey as a valuable example in the relationship between medicine and literature, and identifies the discourse on health as a key component in the making of the Turkish nation-building ideology. By focusing on the place of health and illness in canonical and non-canonized fiction, it opens a new field in Turkish literary studies"--