Women’s Literature in Turkey and Analytical Examination of Author Profiles (15 May 2010-15 August 2012, 109K517)
Project Manager:
Çimen Günay-Erkol
Section:
Humanities and Social Sciences
Research Areas:
testimonial narrations, gender, medical humanities, masculinity studies
Project Start Year:
2010
Project End Year:
2012
Phone:
+90(216) 564 9378
E-Mail:
About the Project:
The inequality in the visibility of women writers is a major problem all around the world. When made visible, they are often treated as a whole under the unifying term “women’s literature”. This project aimed to contribute to gender equality by making women writers of Turkey visible but with a critical approach at their literary output, hence questioning the common denominators that is suggestive of a canon. A sociological analysis is carried out, by a comparative examination of author dictionaries and anthologies, women writers’ life stories are extracted, and lists of their publications are prepared.
Project Finding:
This project is funded by TÜBİTAK, the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, and partially supported by ESF, the European Science Foundation, under the ISCH Action IS0901 titled “Women Writers in History-Toward a New Understanding of European Literary Culture.” An online database of life stories and works of women writers in Turkey is created and analyses are carried out on selected writers. One of the major findings of the project is that a comparative look at women’s writing challenges the idea of “women’s literature” as a singular and homogenous body. Not only writers of different generations, but also peers have fundamental and notable differences in addition to resemblances, between each other.