The image of the mirror in the modern Turkish novel (1872-1973)

The mirror has been an object used to reflect the image both privately and publicly for centuries and attributed to religious, metaphysical, and social meanings. The mirror generally identified with women is a personal belonging and an important object of places, and it is believed to be magic from time to time. Mirror, which is always fascinating to people and seen as an important part of their lives, thereby has been used for various purposes in different meanings in literary texts. Ranging from legends to novels, the meaning and importance attributed to mirrors have also changed. In modern literature, while the old uses are preserved, new contexts also have been created, especially in terms of its relation to the individual and society. From Şemsettin Sami to Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil, from Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar to Leyla Erbil, Murathan Mungan, and Orhan Pamuk, the mirror can at times stand in the center, representing the essence of individual texts and sometimes of the author's corpus. Tracing the mirror in Turkish literature provides important data to understand people and society, which is one of the main goals of literature. In Modern Turkish Literature, there is no study taking the mirror as an object and including a wide-framed literature review over novels. This dissertation aims to fill this gap. Due to the abundance of the material, the focus has been on the genre of novels, as it gives the most diverse and abundant material, and the novels written from 1872 to 1973, are handled with.