The nationalist conservative discourse in the Independence War novels

The study focuses on respectively Tarık Buğra's novels Küçük Ağa and Firavun İmanı, as well as Hüseyin Karatay's Çalınan Savaş and Ali Erkan Kavaklı's Gülü Koklayamadım. These novels that depict the Turkish War of Independence emphasize that the Turkish Muslim population carried out the struggle. According to them, the primary motivation was based on concepts such as jihad, holy war, and resistance against infidels. It is claimed that religious people, like protagonists in the novels, are historically the leading undertakers of the war; however, according to the books, after the war ended and the Republic was proclaimed, they remained in the background, were intimidated, and faced injustice through politicized law. Tarık Buğra, who pioneered the nationalist conservative view of the genre with his novel Küçük Ağa, inspired other writers with the plot, characters, opening and closing scenes, and proclamations of his novels. Moreover, in Karatay and Kavaklı's novels, the language hardens and carries forward Bugra's theses. It is alleged that the Turkish War of Independence was stolen from the opposition Second Group parliamentarians and religious circles by Mustafa Kemal Pasha and the founding cadres of the Republic. The authors argue that they opposed the dominant ideology with their novels and presented alternative historical narratives by revealing the truth. These novels, in which art is instrumentalized and constructed around a doctrine, are examined as ordinary production objects with their ideological aspects. The interaction between the ideology and literature is tried to be clarified by considering the social, political, and cultural dimensions of the period they were written in. In the first section, after categorizing the novels about the Turkish War of Independence, I list the characteristics of the examined novels. Then, by looking at genre theories, I review them through the attributes of historical novels and novels with a thesis. Each novel is discussed in separate chapters under different headings in detail. History is not seen as past events but as a legitimate power to establish the future in these novels. Therefore, I argue that the four books in question, which have political theses, used the literary field to prove their claims.