"Bayrak şairi" ve daha fazlası: Arif Nihat Asya'nın şiirlerini yeniden okumak

This thesis attempts to reread the poetry of Arif Nihat Asya in its particular political and historical context. The research question in this critical study is as follows: to what extent can the poetry of Arif Nihat Asya help students of social sciences in an understanding of Turkish-Islamic nationalist ideological discourse and mobilization from the transition to multi-party politics to the present-day political life in Turkey? This thesis makes an original contribution to the existing scholarship on three levels. First and foremost, it demonstrates that rather than being critical, analytical and original, the existing and predominantly Turkish-language academic works are based on a biased, selective and Turkish romanticization of Asya's poetry. Second, taking the conceptual and theoretical debates on "poetic discourse" and "poetry of nationalism" from different parts of the world as its frame of reference, this study inserts Asya's poetic work into the late and post-Ottoman context. Third, this original contribution in the particular context of nationalist poetic discourse reveals that there are three themes that appear most in his poetry: the conquest of Manzikert and Constantinople, struggle with communism during the Cold War and the Cyprus conflict. Going beyond the discursive analysis this study shows that poetry is a convenient literary genre that has an exceptional feature at the service of popular political mobilization.