Rethinking Early Socialist Literature in Turkey: Kahraman Kız and the Prehistory of the Turkish Socialist Novel
Middle East Critique, 2026 (SSCI, Scopus)
- Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
- Basım Tarihi: 2026
- Doi Numarası: 10.1080/19436149.2026.2706398
- Dergi Adı: Middle East Critique
- Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus, Arab World Research Source, Index Islamicus, MLA - Modern Language Association Database, MLA International Bibliography, Academic Search Ultimate (EBSCO), Humanities Source Ultimate (EBSCO)
- Anahtar Kelimeler: class perspective, Kahraman Kız, Socialist literature, Turkish socialist novel, İştirak
- Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
The emergence of socialist aesthetics in Turkish literature corresponds to the early Second Constitutional Era, a time of limited liberalization that enabled socialist ideologies to surface. Figures such as Rasim Haşmet—hailed by Asım Bezirci as the first socialist poet and journalist—alongside Abdülaziz Mecdî Tolun, Muallim Cûdî, Ahmed Rıfkı Baba, and Bedik, produced foundational works in various periodicals. Among these is Kahraman Kız (1910), a serialized novel published under the pseudonym Asu in the socialist magazine İştirak, affiliated with the Ottoman Socialist Party. Appearing in four installments and left unfinished, Kahraman Kız occupies a distinctive place in the prehistory of the Turkish socialist novel: it is an early, perhaps the earliest, known attempt in Ottoman Turkish to imagine socialist conflict in novelistic form. This article therefore examines Kahraman Kız, a text largely overlooked beyond its script transcription, and argues that it unsettles the established chronology of Turkish socialist fiction by revealing a socialist literary imagination already taking shape in the Ottoman period.