Health, Literature and Women in Twentieth-Century Turkey: Bodies of Exception

Description

Health, Literature and Women 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 book places Turkish literature in the field of health humanities 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-canonised fiction, it opens a new field in Turkish literary studies. Cover Half Title Series Information Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Figures Acknowledgements Introduction Notes 1 Who Is Inside? Who Is Outside?: Limits of the Healthy and Sturdy Nation Bodies That Make the Nation Eugenics: Limits of the Nation Disciplining Populations: Sports and Fitness Notes 2 The Making of the Healthy Woman: Halide Edib and the Politics of Medicine Regulatory Desire and Self as the Embodiment of Nation: What to Do With the Body? The Haunting of Handan and Ayesha: How to Master the Flesh Naturalism and the Question of Émile Zola’s Idealism From Degenerate Sara to the Fit Body of Lale: Saving the Soul Notes 3 Almost a Man, But Not Quite: Medicine and Gender in Melodrama Melodramatic Mode and Sickly Bodies of Women Melodramatic Mode and Melodrama in the Early Republican Fiction in Turkey Masculinity as a Crisis in the Moral Order: Almost a Man, But Not Quite Hiçkirik: The Recreation of the Moral Occult Posta Güvercini: Hypermasculinity and the Threat of Capitalism Notes 4 Adhered to the Flesh: Lived Bodies in Modernist Literature After 1960 The Cultural Cold War and the Resisting Material Body The Hopeful Touch in Tezer Ozlu’s Çocuklugun Soguk Geceleri Doing a Juju Dance in the Face of X-Ray: Sevim Burak’s “Afrika Dansi” as a Text of Modernist Resistance ‘I-am, I-Am, I-Am’ – In the Void of a Lost/Found I Notes Epilogue Notes Works Cited Index