Научная статья:The Development of Turkish Literature Under the Influence of the West.


After the 18th century, efforts were made in Turkish (Ottoman) society to move into the orbit of Western civilization. Following developments in the military and political fields began to be felt in literary life as well. Writers who had seen the West and were closely acquainted with it were the first heralds of this new literature. The appearance of the newspaper 'Tercüman-ı Ahaval' in 1860 is generally accepted as the start of the literature that developed under the influence of the West. Being neither official nor semi-official, the paper was the first to be brought out under a private initiative. The regarded period have been ushered and further divided into sub-periods: The Administrative Reform, the Servet-i Fünun, Fecr-i Ati, National Literature and Republic and after periods
The IXX-XX centuries have a special place in the history of Turkish literature. It is a kind of transition period, when the Ottoman Divan poetry of the feudal era, gradually had died away and the literature of new bourgeois society was born. The poetry in feudal Turkey was permeated with the desire to imitate the Arab and especially the Persian samples, but now with the development of capitalist relations and the general orientation of the country to the West, appeared a powerful stream in the literature which brought the ideas of Western culture.
With the decline and eventual demise of the Ottoman Empire, came a change in literature. For one, French styles emerged, exerting their influence on Turkish writers, particularly poets, as new poetic forms were introduced. The founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal, initiated the creation of a modified Latin alphabet to replace the Arabic-based script of the Ottomans. Poets and other writers also adopted the French language to write in, as was necessary in order to gain recognition and readers from Europe and an increasingly Westernized world.
The new cultural construction embodied in the struggle with the old forms, in approval of new themes, plots, genres, and in an attempt to reveal the new language tools a new way of thinking. Unknown in the feudal Turkey such genres as press, fiction and drama were created. Turkish writers started to prefer the novel, play, short story.
Tanzimat Literature was a period of Turkish Enlightenment, so called line, which gave birth to the Turkish Realism’s aesthetic and ideological preparation. According to the writers of the Enlightenment, this period was mostly in step with Enlightenment view of art.
In poetry, which at that time was pushed into the background, also appeared significant changes in the verses, new content, new metric, new genres, vocabulary had changed considerably. During the XIX-XX centuries. Turkish poetry passed a difficult path. İt was the path of the fierce struggle between old and new forms.
6.Turkish poets of the XIX-XX centuries differed significantly from the poets of the feudal era. It was not court poets and aesthetes of the lyrics, eager to improve the form of verse, often at the expense of content. Political and public figures, educators and writers was engaged in poetry. Many Turkish poets have passed a difficult life path. They were part of the stormy events that took place in their home countries. That is why best poetic works like a mirror reflected the era in which they were created, with its positive and negative sides, with all the disadvantages of the time.
All of the salient aspects of Turkish life, politics and culture had found their direct or indirect expression in poetry, fiction, and drama, as well as in critical and scholarly writing. The themes and concerns have included nationalism, social justice, search for modernity. Westernization, revival of folk culture, economic and technological progress, human dignity, mysticism, pluralistic society, human rights and fundamental freedoms, democratic ideals, Ataturkism, Turanism, Marxist-Lenist ideology, revival of Islam, humanism in fact all aspect and components of contemporary culture found a voice in literature.