PROVINCIAL LIFE IN THE TURKISH NOVEL: The Social Organization, Intellectuals And The Alienation

The Turkish novel, especially during the Second Constitutionalist period (beginning in 1908), was inclined to yield more and broader works of life in villages, towns and small cities across Anatolia. This was an indirect reflection of nationalism that became the mainstream in he literary field due to the changes in the social and political atmosphere through the Second Constitutionalist period. Anatolia and the life of the people in Anatolia with different dimensions and aspects is still a common theme in our literature. In some of the novels, it has been used as the conflict between the provincial and the urban intellectuals, in other words, the provincial mind and the civilized mind. This conflict, in some novels, is resolved when the civilized mind is seized by the provincial atmosphere of numbness and thus is transformed to a more rural shape. In this paper, three novels, Yaban (Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu-1932), Kuyucaklı Yusuf (Sabahattin Ali-1937) and Acımak (Reşat Nuri Güntekin-1928), all published before 1940’s, dealing with urban intellectuals who move to the countryside and are assimilated in the social structure of the rural life through the Second Constitutionalist period, will be studied on the basis of urban sociology and sociology of literature (especially Georg Simmel and Gaston Bachelard).