Articles

Turkish Detective Novel (Background)

Vostok/Oriens '2014, №2

 
The article considers a detective genre development in the literature of Turkey of the New Time against the background of a complicated interaction of “high” /elite/ and “low” /mass/ literature. The Turkish detective genre appeared at the end of the 19th century on the base of the national literature (cheap popular literature and fiction) and Western (mainly French) detective literature and has formed its own principles within the whole 20th century. Detectives shared the country literary provinces with other “low” mass genres. Such a status of the detective was determined mainly by a powerful leftist literary criticism. It considered the use of the genre strategies as a non-prestigious and bad affair. However, by 1990s, when the Turkish detective fundamental parameters were basically formed up, the literary situation in Turkey cardinally changed. Critical social realistic prose stopped meeting the requirements of the most part of national readers’ circles. Mass literature and postmodernism exploiting the detective genre with equal intensity have moved forward. The combination of the detective genre forms with other genres of the mass literature as well as a travesty using detective codes by the Turkish post-modernism turned it into the most demanded, “marginal” literary genre of Turkey in the period of 1990–2000.

Keywords: cheap popular literature, Turkish detective, Turkish mass literature, Turkish post-modernism, “marginal” literary genre, genre form

Pages: С. 71–79