From Orhon inscriptions to Orhan Pamuk, the story of Turkish literature from the eighth century A.D. to the present day is rich and complex, full of firm traditions and daring transformations. Spanning a wide geographic range from Outer Mongolia and the environs of China through the Middle East all the way to Europe, the history of Turkish literature embraces a multitude of traditions and influences. All have left their imprint on the distinctive amalgam that is uniquely Turkish. Always receptive to the nurturing values, aesthetic tastes, and literary penchants of diverse civilizations, Turkish culture succeeded in evolving a sui generis personality. It clung to its own established traits, yet it was flexible enough to welcome innovations—and even revolutionary change. A Millennium of Turkish Literature tells the story of how literature evolved and grew in stature on the Turkish mainland over the course of a thousand years. The book features numerous poems and extracts in fluid translations by Halman and others. This volume provides a concise and captivating introduction to Turkish literature and, with selections from its extensive “Suggested Reading” section, serves as an invaluable guide to Turkish literature for course adoption.

Introduction -- CONFIGURATIONS OF STEREOTYPES AND IDENTITIES: NEW METHODOLOGIES. Daniela Berghahn: My big fat Turkish wedding: from culture clash to romcom -- David Gramling: The oblivion of influence: mythical realism in Feo Alada's When we leave -- Marco Abel: The minor cinema of Thomas Arslan: a prolegomenon -- MULTIPLE SCREENS AND PLATFORMS: FROM DOCUMENTARY AND TELEVISION TO INSTALLATION ART. Angelica Fenner: Roots and routes of the diasporic documentarian: a psychogeography of Fatih Akin's We forgot to go back -- Ingeborg Majer-O'Sickey: Gendered kicks: Buket Alakus's and Aysun Bademsoy's soccer films -- Nilgan Bayraktar: Location and mobility in Kutlu Ataman's site-specific video installation Kuba -- Brent Peterson: Turkish for beginners: teaching cosmopolitanism to Germans -- Brad Prager: "Only the wounded honor fights": Zili Alada's rage and the drama of the Turkish German perpetrator -- INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXTS: STARS, THEATERS, AND RECEPTION. Randall Halle: The German Turkish spectator and Turkish language film programming: Karli Kino, maximum distribution, and the interzone cinema -- Berna Gueneli: Mehmet Kurtulu and Birol Ünel: Sexualized masculinities, normalized ethnicities -- Karolin Machtans: The perception and marketing of Fatih Akin in the German press -- Ayìa Tunì Cox: Hyphenated identities: the reception of Turkish-German cinema in the Turkish daily press -- THE CINEMA OF FATIH AKIN: AUTHORSHIP, IDENTITY, AND BEYOND. Mine Eren: Cosmopolitan filmmaking: Fatih Akin's In July and Head-on -- Roger Hillman and Vivien Silvey: Remixing Hamburg: transnationalism in Fatih Akin's Soul kitchen -- Deniz Gukturk: World cinema goes digital: looking at Europe from the other shore.

Creating Global Music in Turkey looks at the rise of ”world music” in Turkey by analyzing this country’s various “traditional” or ethnic music forms. The book focuses on the uniquely Turkish musical forms exemplified by Gypsy, Sufi, and Folk music, and explores how these have been incorporated into the global discourses of world music. In doing so, the book also shows how the place-making strategies of globalization are embodied through the construction of an “authentic” Istanbul sound under the label of world music. The reader is invited to consider each musical tradition as being a unique realm in its incorporation into world music. The process of incorporation and appropriation is explained by examination of the specificities of each realm. This book is unique within the relevant literature, focusing on the production of a global cultural form outside of the Western world. It uses the findings of comprehensive ethnographic research to reveal to the reader the strategies of actors, the discursive mechanisms in the field, and how the world music markets operate.

This Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of Turkish literature within both a local and global context. Across eight thematic sections a collection of subject experts use close readings of literature materials to provide a critical survey of the main issues and topics within the literature. The chapters provide analysis on a wide range of genres and text types, including novels, poetry, religious texts, and drama, with works studied ranging from the fourteenth century right up to the present day. Using such a historic scope allows the volume to be read across cultures and time, while simultaneously contextualizing and investigating how modern Turkish literature interacts with world literature, and finds its place within it. Collectively, the authors challenge the national literary historiography by replacing the Ottoman Turkish literature in the Anatolian civilizations with its plurality of cultures. They also seek to overcome the institutional and theoretical shortcomings within current study of such works, suggesting new approaches and methods for the study of Turkish literature. The Routledge Handbook on Turkish Literature marks a new departure in the reading and studying of Turkish literature. It will be a vital resource for those studying literature, Middle East studies, Turkish and Ottoman history, social sciences, and political science.

Essays covering a broad range of genres and ranging from the late Ottoman era to contemporary literature open the debate on the place of Turkish literature in the globalized literary world. Explorations of the multilingual cosmopolitanism of the Ottoman literary scene are complemented by examples of cross-generational intertextual encounters. The renowned poet Nâzim Hikmet is studied from a variety of angles, while contemporary and popular writers such as Orhan Pamuk and Elif Safak are contextualized. Turkish Literature as World Literature not only fills a significant lacuna in world literary studies but also draws a composite historical, political, and cultural portrait of Turkey in its relations with the broader world.

In The Human-Animal Relationship in Pre-Modern Turkish Literature: A Study of The Book of Dede Korkut and The Masnavi, Book I, II, Dilek Bulut Sarikaya explores medieval Anatolia, where humans' connectivity to nonhuman animals was not yet disrupted by the capitalist economic systems and demonstrates how ancient societies treated nonhuman animals as self-conscious, spiritual individuals, capable of feeling pain with highly advanced forms of intentionality.

Here, Jayne L. Warner has created a unique biographical tapestry that illuminates not only the life of one of Turkey's leading literary and cultural authorities, but also the emergence of a republic in his native country, and sheds new light on the history of one of the world's great cities. Sumptuously illustrated throughout with evocative period pictures of Istanbul, Turkish Nomad tells the extraordinary life story of this poet, thinker, and diplomat. As a young boy, Halman surveyed the last vestiges of the Ottoman Empire, walked through the ruins of Byzantium, and grew up in the modern nation created by the charismatic Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Talat S. Halman would go on to serve the republic as its first minister of culture. The more than four decades Halman lived primarily in the United States are not overlooked but are used to discuss how his ideas developed as he taught at leading unversities-Princeton, Columbia, New York University-and introduced Americans to Turkish literature and culture through his translations and public lectures. We In the Turkish Nomad we follow the literary, scholastic, and journalistic journey of a restless writer, who might best be described by the title of one of his books, The Turkish Muse, his 2006 collection of literary reviews tracing the development of Turkish literature during the Turkish Republic.

The articles contained in this volume collectively provide a critical overview of Turkish literature from its earliest phases in the sixth century well into the Republican period, including pieces detailing the literature of the Ottoman as well as those dealing with Europeanization. In so doing, the author illustrates the evolution of Turkish culture as reflected in the literary experience. Exploring specific genres and themes, several articles detail the development of drama from Karagoz and Orta oyunu to contemporary Western theatre, the propaganda functions of poetry, and the important place of folk literature. In addition, the volume focuses on some of the leading figures of Turkish literature, ranging from Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi, Yunus Emre, and Süleyman the Magnificent, to Sait Faik and modern poets such as Nazim Hikmet, Orhan Veli Kanik, and Melih Cevdet Anday. Whether read as a whole or as individual articles, the book gives Western readers a broad and long overdue entry into the rich landscape of traditional and contemporary Turkish literature and culture. For scholars, it is an invaluable resource for courses on Turkish literature and culture.

At the heart of this book is a spectral theory of world literature that draws on Edward Said, Aamir Mufti, Jacques Derrida and world-systems theory to assess how the field produces local literature as an "e;other"e; that haunts its universalising, assimilative imperative with the force of the uncanny. It takes the Middle Eastern novel as both metonym and metaphor of a spectral world literature. It explores the worlding of novels from the Middle East in recent years, and, focusing on the pivotal sites of Middle Eastern modernity (Egypt, Turkey, Iran), argues that lost to their global production, circulation and reception is their constitution in the logic of spectrality. With the intention of redressing this imbalance, it critically restores their engagements with the others of Middle Eastern modernity and shows, through a new reading of the Middle Eastern novel, that world literature is always-already haunted by its others, the ghosts of modernity.

If countercultural literature is meant to "counter" a culture, what happens when another culture borrows that critique? Translating the Counterculture addresses that question by examining the reception of the Beat Generation in Turkey. There, the Beat message of dissent is being given renewed life as publishers, editors, critics, readers, and others dissatisfied with the conservative social and political trends in the country have turned to the Beats and other countercultural forebears for alternatives. Through an examination of a broad range of literary translations, media portrayals, interviews, and other related materials, Translating the Counterculture seeks to uncover how the Beats and their texts are being circulated, discussed, and used in Turkey to rethink the possibilities they might hold for social critique today. By focusing on the ways in which local conditions and particular needs shape reception, Mortenson questions our understanding of the Beats in both popular culture and academic discourse. He examines how in Turkey the Beats have been framed by the label "underground literature"; explores the ways they are repurposed in the counterculture-inspired journal Underground Poetix; looks at the reception of Kerouac's On the Road and how that reaction provides a better understanding of the construction of "American-ness"; delves into the recent obscenity trial of William S. Burroughs's novel The Soft Machine and the attention the book's supporters brought to government repression and Turkish homophobia; and analyzes the various translations of Allen Ginsberg's Howl to demonstrate the relevance Ginsberg still holds for social rebellion today. Translating the Counterculture takes a revolutionary look at how contemporary readers in other parts of the world respond to the Beats. Challenging and unsettling an American-centric understanding of the Beats, Mortenson pushes the discipline toward a fuller consideration of their cultural legacy in a globalized twenty-first century.