Literary Movements in the Tanzimat and Servet-i Fünûn Novel

Literary movements not only present certain writing technics, they have a social, economic, philosophical et cetera background about the periods they emerged as well. Accordingly, it is possible to analyze a period by looking at the effectual literary movements of the period. One may observe various literary movements in the tradition of the Ottoman Poetry which dominated the Turkish literature for centuries. But the Western literary movements appear in the Turkish literature by the Tanzimat Period. In this period, literary movements came out as a matter of choice and fact that differs from author to author. Because literary movement in the Turkish literature shapes with regard to the author rather than the social needs of the intellectuals. Since the Western literary forms appear in the Turkish literature as a measurement of Westernization, the significance of prose advances along with poetry. Novel is the most advanced type of prose. It had not appeared in the Turkish literature before the Tanzimat Period and is used for many distinct purposes by the artists of the first period. It is possible to see this new genre both a means of Westernization and a break away from tradition in literature. It is a tough job to perform the novel form to a literature whose prose is undeveloped. The authors of the Tanzimat Period do not omit taking advantage of tradition in order to overcome this toughness. And they always consider literary movements in order to give successful examples of a developed Western form of novel. In this study, I will comment on the novels written in the Tanzimat Period and dwell on their relation with the Western literary movements. In this evaluation process, I will give point to breaking away from tradition, the effects of the period, artistic perspective of the authors and practice-level of the literary movements in Turkish literature. Keywords: Tanzimat Period, Servet-i Fünûn Period, Novel, Literary Movements, Tradition.