Health, Literature and Women 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 women’s fiction to shape the imagination of the period. Starting from the nineteenth century, health gradually became a focal topic in relation to the future of the empire, and later the Republic. Examining representations of health and illness in nationalist romances, melodramas and modernist works, this book will explore diseases such as syphilis, tuberculosis and cancer, and their representation in the literary imagination as a tool to discuss anxieties over cultural transformation. This book places Turkish literature in the field of health humanities 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-canonised fiction, it opens a new field in Turkish literary studies.
Author(s): Şima İmşir
Series: Routledge Studies in Literature and Health Humanities
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 212
City: New York
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Notes
1 Who Is Inside? Who Is Outside?: Limits of the Healthy and Sturdy Nation
Bodies That Make the Nation
Eugenics: Limits of the Nation
Disciplining Populations: Sports and Fitness
Notes
2 The Making of the Healthy Woman: Halide Edib and the Politics of Medicine
Regulatory Desire and Self as the Embodiment of Nation: What to Do With the Body?
The Haunting of Handan and Ayesha: How to Master the Flesh
Naturalism and the Question of Émile Zola’s Idealism
From Degenerate Sara to the Fit Body of Lale: Saving the Soul
Notes
3 Almost a Man, But Not Quite: Medicine and Gender in Melodrama
Melodramatic Mode and Sickly Bodies of Women
Melodramatic Mode and Melodrama in the Early Republican Fiction in Turkey
Masculinity as a Crisis in the Moral Order: Almost a Man, But Not Quite
Hiçkirik: The Recreation of the Moral Occult
Posta Güvercini: Hypermasculinity and the Threat of Capitalism
Notes
4 Adhered to the Flesh: Lived Bodies in Modernist Literature After 1960
The Cultural Cold War and the Resisting Material Body
The Hopeful Touch in Tezer Ozlu’s Çocuklugun Soguk Geceleri
Doing a Juju Dance in the Face of X-Ray: Sevim Burak’s “Afrika Dansi” as a Text of Modernist Resistance
‘I-am, I-Am, I-Am’ – In the Void of a Lost/Found I
Notes
Epilogue
Notes
Works Cited
Index
