AN ATTEMPT TO CLASSIFICATON OF TRADITIONAL WORKS ON THEORY OF MEANING AND LITERARY THEORIES IN TURKISH

Poetic and prosaic literature of Turkish had been written with Arabicscript between Xth and XXth centuries is still subject of many researches. Inthis respect, works and practices on text understanding and evaluation of this written language are still extant. Those traditional literature that possesses similar and common terminology differs from each other in point of classification, method and some content. Therefore those literature have been considered as two main categories which are “theories of meaning” and “literary theories” according to their way of approach. In this paper, those literature will be classified with regard to Tashköprüzade’s Miftah al-Saʻada and thereby will be linked to lines of development in Arabic and Persian literatures. Accordingly, traditional Turkish literature on theories of meaning and literary theories consist of works on al-balagha, naqd al-shi’r and insha.