Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
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 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 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.