The Turkish Muse
Views and Reviews, 1960s-1990s

Cloth $59.95s    |    0-8156-3068-9    |    2006

The first collection of its kind, this volume of more than 225 essays, offers penetrating analysis and insight into the important works of modern Turkish literature.

Description
The Turkish Muse: Views and Reviews, 1960s-1990s, collects Talat S. Halman’s book reviews written in English and, read chronologically, provides a unique perspective on the development of Turkish literature and criticism during the formative and later years of the Turkish Republic. The new genres adopted from Europe and, to a lesser extent, from the United States include the novel, the short story, the stage play, and the essay. The reviews collected in this volume reflect the way in which these genres developed and matured within their new milieu of Turkish letters. Establishing each book in its literary, social, and cultural Turkish context, Halman then addresses the work’s more international or universal importance. Written over a period of four decades, these reviews illuminate the careers of many writers from their early work to their rise as leading Turkish poets, novelists, and dramatists—Ilhan Berk, Melih Cevdet Anday, Güngör Dilmen, Fazil Hüsnü Da§larca, and Yas¸ar Kemal, to name just a few. More recent reviews discuss the work of such important figures as Hilmi Yavuz and Orhan Pamuk.

Authors
Talat S. Halman is a leading translator of Turkish literature into English. Before establishing the Department of Turkish Literature at Bilkent University, Ankara, he taught at Columbia University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York University. Halman is author and editor of more than sixty books, including Contemporary Turkish Literature, Modern Turkish Drama, and Süleyman the Magnificent Poet. He is editor of the Journal of Turkish Literature.

Jayne L. Warner is director of research at the Institute for Aegean Prehistory in Greenwich, Connecticut.

6 1/2 x 9 1/8, 390 pages

Copublished with Crescent Hill Publications