Appropriation and reception of classical antiquity in Early Republican Turkey: A case in mediterranean modernism

The thesis examines the appropriation and reception of classical antiquity in literary texts from the late Ottoman and early Republican eras and proposes to flesh out the interwoven margins of modern Turkish and Greek literary history. Drawing on world literature scholarship, the introduction establishes a comparative approach to the literary studies of the Mediterranean. The two main chapters focus on the leading authors from the two literary movements in Turkish literary history that come forward in their treatment of classical reception and examine the works of these authors next to Greek authors who share similar approaches to the appropriation of classical antiquity. The first chapter focuses on how Yahya Kemal Beyatlı and Constantine Cavafy explore themes of decline as they draw upon Greco-Roman and Byzantine history. The latter discusses how Azra Erhat and George Seferis undermine the rigidity of nationalist boundaries in their description of the Mediterranean landscape, ancient ruins, and spolia from Western Asia Minor. By utilizing the frame of Mediterranean Modernism, it is argued that we must delve into how these authors react to Western European conceptions of classical antiquity and how they react to the escalating nationalism of their time against the backdrop of their multicultural background.