The “Once-Forgotten” Turkish bestseller: (Re-) contextualizing Sabahattin Ali’s Madonna in a Fur Coat

Abstract

This thesis explores the reason(s) why Sabahattin Ali’s novel, Kürk Mantolu Madonna, was translated into English after 73 years and how it has been (re-)presented and (re-)contextualized in the Anglophone world. Apart from the Anglophone context, the thesis investigates the way Sabahattin Ali and his work have been re-created and re-contextualized in the Turkish context in order to be able to analyze the recent ‘unexpected’ and ‘surprise’ popularity of Kürk Mantolu Madonna in the source culture. In the light of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “agency” and his field theory, the thesis also focuses on the key role of the publishers in the source and target cultures, as well as the editor of Kürk Mantolu Madonna as social agents in the “consecration”, (re-)creation and (re-)contextualization of the book both in Turkey and in the international arena. In the thesis, a critical, descriptive and comparative analysis of Madonna in a Fur Coat and Kürk Mantolu Madonna will be carried out by employing Gideon Toury’s (1995) “operational” and “matricial norms” to foreground the differences between the source and target texts by pointing out the necessity of having (co-)translators and copy editors, who are native speakers of source language, in the case of books translated from minor(ity) languages and literatures in particular.