The Novel and Its Discontents

This book offers an English-language account of how the Turkish novel has imagined the modern individual, from the late Ottoman period to the 1970s. Through readings of Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil, Peyami Safa, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar and Oğuz Atay, it argues that the genre’s formal experiments—interior monologue, unreliable narration and irony—are inseparable from its persistent unease with modernisation.

Written for readers with no knowledge of Turkish, the study situates these works within wider debates on the novel and modernity.