Representation of Beyoğlu in short story writing of the 1940s generation in Turkey

Abstract

This study focuses on the representation of Beyoğlu in short stories written between the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1950s by nine authors who were accepted as the representatives of the 1940s generation. Two developments marked the political history of this long decade: The Second World War and discussions about the transition to multi-party life. In these years, a radical change concurrently occurred in the positions of intellectuals in society and at the state level. The lit erary intellectual, who was a part of the bureaucracy in the early Repub lican period, became both excluded from the state elite and impover ished. In literature, as the little man became a common theme, the figure of the narrator who lived among the little men and narrated them rose to prominence. As story writing was poised for a rapid rise in the 50s during this period, literary modernism also became a major trend. The story writer began to focus more on his own individuality as the “loitering little man.” The study reveals the relationship between the rise of literary modernism in Turkish short story writing and the increase of Beyoğlu representations in number and content. How the representations of Beyoğlu shaped the modernism of the 1940s and how the rise of modernism affected the literary representation of Beyoğlu are dis cussed.