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About this Guide
This Research Guide will help you find Turkish language and literature resources available thru the BU Libraries. Here you will find information on:
- Language resources - dictionaries and grammar books
- Background information - guides, encyclopedias, biographies
- Open Access resources including websites and digital collections
- Related programs at Boston University
- From Constantinople to Istanbul (Byzantium: Tale of Three Cities, Episode 2) Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul. One metropolis has been the capital city of three empires - Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman. Each has brought its own faiths, beliefs and traditions, and each has left its mark on architecture, traditions and on the faith-communities who still populate this vast modern metropolis. In this series, Simon Sebag-Montefiore unveils Istanbul's strange and complex past in all its vibrancy and colour against the backdrop of this modern, living city.
Featured Resources
Red Star over the Black Sea: Nâzim Hikmet and his Generation by
Nâzım Hikmet (1902-1963) is best known as a poet and communist whose daring flight by motorboat from Turkey to the Eastern Bloc captured international headlines in 1951. One of the most important poets to have written in the Turkish language, Nâzım Hikmet's dramatic life story is fascinating in its own right, but also intersects with the story of the broader twentieth century. James H. Meyer situates Nâzım Hikmet within the broader context of Turkish communist "border-crossers," individuals whose lives would go on to be shaped significantly by their ability, inability, or need to traverse the frontier. Born at the turn of the twentieth century and coming of age in the early 1920s, the women and men from Nâzım Hikmet's generation were the last of the Ottomans. Children of empire, they had grown up in an era of porous frontiers, but by the time they reached their third decade, these borders had begun to close. Drawing upon an enormous amount of previously untapped archival materials and personal papers from Moscow, Istanbul, Amsterdam, and Washington, DC, Meyer has written a biography of Nâzım Hikmet unlike any other. A book of world history wrapped inside a life story, Red Star over the Black Sea shows how changing attitudes toward borders and the people who cross them impacted a late imperial generation all the way up to the final years of the Cold War.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2023
Nights of Plague: a novel by
"A new book by the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Part detective story, part historical epic--a bold and brilliant novel that imagines a plague taking over a fictional island in the Ottoman Empire. It is April 1900, in the Levant, on the imaginary island of Mingeria--the 29th state of the Ottoman Empire--located in the eastern Mediterranean between Crete and Cyprus. Half the population is Muslim, the other half are Orthodox Greeks, and tension is high between the two. When a plague arrives--brought either by Muslim pilgrims returning from the Mecca, or by merchant vessels coming from Alexandria--the island revolts. To stop the epidemic, the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II sends his most accomplished quarantine expert to the island--an Orthodox Christian. Some of the Muslims, including followers of a popular religious sect and its leader Sheikh H, refuse to take precautions or respect the quarantine. And the sultan's expert is murdered. As the plague continues its rapid spread, the sultan sends a second doctor to the island, this time a Muslim, and strict quarantine measures are declared. But the incompetence of the island's governor and local administration and the people's refusal to respect the bans dooms the quarantine to failure, and the death count continues to rise. Faced with the danger that the plague might spread to the West and to Istanbul, the sultan bows to international pressure and allows foreign and Ottoman warships to blockade the island. Now the people of Mingeria are on their own, and they must find a way to defeat the plague themselves. Steeped in history and rife with suspense, Nights of Plague is an epic story set more than one hundred years ago with themes that feel remarkably contemporary"--
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2022
The Turkish Novel and the Quest for Rationality by
The Turkish Novel and the Quest for Rationality offers an alternative genealogy of the emergence and development of the Turkish novel by situating the genre in an intellectual framework motivated by conceptions of reason and rationality in the Turkish modernization project.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2019
Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel by
Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy is the first critical study of all of Pamuk's novels, including the early untranslated work. In 2005 Orhan Pamuk was charged with "insulting Turkishness" under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code. Eighteen months later he was awarded the Nobel Prize. After decades of criticism for wielding a depoliticized pen, Pamuk was cast as a dissident through his trial, an event that underscored his　transformation from national literateur to global author. By contextualizing Pamuk's fiction into the Turkish tradition and by defining the literary and political intersections of his work, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy rereads Pamuk's dissidence as a factor of the form of his novels. This is not a traditional study of literature, but a book that turns to literature to ask larger questions about recent transformations in Turkish history, identity, modernity, and collective memory. As a corrective to common misreadings of Pamuk's work in its international reception, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy applies various analytical lenses to the politics of the Turkish novel, including gender studies, cultural translation, historiography, and Islam. The book argues that modern literature that confronts representations of the nation-state, or devlet, with those of Ottoman, Islamic, and Sufi contexts, or din, constitute "secular blasphemies" that redefine the politics of the Turkish novel. Concluding with a meditation on conditions of "untranslatability" in Turkish literature, this study provides a comprehensive and critical analysis of Pamuk's novels to date.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2013
A Millennium of Turkish Literature by
From Orhon inscriptions to Orhan Pamuk, the story of Turkish literature from the eighth century A.D. to the present day is rich and complex, full of firm traditions and daring transformations. Spanning a geographic range from Outer Mongolia and the environs of China through Inner Asia, the Caucasus, the Middle East and North Africa, the Balkans and Europe all the way to North America, the history of Turkish literature encompasses an amalgam of cultural and literary orientations that embraced such traditions and influences as Chinese, Indian, Turkic, Mongolian, Uyghur, Russian, Arabo-Persian, Islamic, Sufi, Judaeo-Christian, Greek, Mesopotamian, Roman, Byzantine, European, Scandinavian, North American, and Latin American. Always receptive to the nurturing values, aesthetic tastes, and literary penchants from diverse civilizations, Turkish culture succeeded in evolving a sui generis personality. It clung onto its own established traits; yet, it was flexible enough to welcome innovations-or even revolutionary change. A Millennium of Turkish Literature tells the story of how literature evolved and grew in stature on the Turkish mainland in the course of a thousand years. The book features numerous poems and extracts, most in fluid translations by Talat S. Halman. This volume provides a concise, but captivating, introduction to Turkish literature and, with selections from its extensive "Further Reading" section, serves as an invaluable guide to Turkish literature for course adoption.
Call Number: Mugar Stacks PL205 .H345 2011 and OnlinePublication Date: 2011
Studies on Turkish Politics and Society by
This book comprises a collection of articles and essays published in a variety of journals during the past decades, which seek to identify and analyze the main factors in Turkish politics. Political parties, military interventions, international relations and cultural developments are given wide coverage alongside studies on literature.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2003
