Potentials of women's writing: A gyno-critical reading in Turkish literature (1895-1950)

This thesis makes a gyno-critical reading of women writers' stories and novels -after the modern literary genres occured- from Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete in which the constitutive discourse of women's writing has gained a sudden intensity in late Ottoman period up to the demands of parity (müsavat-ı tamme) in Second Constitutional Era and the pathriarcal tutelage in the early modern Turkish Republican period. For this reason, this study tries to determine the common themes, images and narrative strategies of the excluded women's writing by male-dominated literary canon and the "antithetical mirror" of Ottoman intellectuals or state feminism. Thereby this thesis seeks for an alternative representation of women's writing to established literary historiographies and periodisation; and tries to make women writers' challenge strategies to patriarchal sexual politics and conversion of literary genres or narrative functions clear.