Kaitlin Staudt
The global turn in Modernist Studies has emphasized the connection between literary modernism’s unique aesthetic practices and the politics of a given modernity. In the Turkish experience of modernity, the question of how to differentiate the identity of the new nation from its predecessor the Ottoman Empire was at the heart of debates about the role of literature and aesthetics. Even though the empire had formally ended with the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, legacies of imperialism fundamentally shaped debates over how literature of the new nation should be written. In this chapter, Kaitlin Staudt suggests that the relationship between modernist literary aesthetics and the literary representation of imperialism in the early Turkish Republic was rooted in global imperial power relations.