Analysis on stories in İkdam newspaper

This study dwells upon the popular stories published under the title of "Selected Stories" in the newspaper İkdam, a popular newspaper started publishing at the last decade of the nineteenth century, most of which consisted of adaptations and translations of French stories, and reflected the taste of "pink books". The study period was restricted to 1894-1898 and the transcriptions of 92 stories published in this period into the Latin alphabet were made. In addition, eight of these stories were made subject to detailed textual analysis. These stories made spontaneous contribution to the transformation of Ottoman-Islamic civilization into Western-European civilization and became instrumental in the uprooting of such values as love, family, friendship etc. from their traditional frame. This horizantal attitude to westernization secured the internalization of social norms, and hence, turned this simple, invaluable stories into a powerful ideological agent of westernization. Although these stories reflect the impact of the realist movement increasingly felt in the aforementioned period, they were heavily formed within the parameters of the romantic movement. The language used in the descriptions of time and place is relatively heavy and full of compound phrases while a simple, easily understood language dominates in the dialogs. Thus the spectrum of readership was aimed to be kept continously widening in accordance to the motto of "educating by way of entertaining". Lacking a serious literal value, these stories, in the main, are among the first examples of a new genre of literature in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire.