The comparison of main women characters and themes in Yaşar Kemal's Ortadirek and Fakir Baykurt's Irazca'nın Dirliği novels

In the end of the 18th century the military failures of The Ottoman Empire against the West led the statesmen and intellectuals of the period to question the current setbacks. For this reason, Western civilization was contacted for various reasons and the need for Western-style innovation was accepted by the state. With the Westernization movement, Turkish society has entered a process of change according to Western understanding. The first examples of literary genres belonging to Western literature, particularly the novel, were given during this period. Literary works played an active role in accelerating the process of innovation with the new pleasure and understanding they presented to the reader, but also reflected social transformation to the reader. Social issues became heavily involved in literary works following the proclamation of the Republic. The move towards Anatolia, which has a dense village population, was realized from a social realistic perspective. Yaşar Kemal's Ortadirek and Village novel writer Fakir Baykurt's Irazca'nın Dirliği novels are two important works in which village and peasantry issues are handled with a socialist realistic understanding. In this study, we compared thematically the works of Yaşar Kemal and Fakir Baykurt, called Ortadirek and Irazca'nın Dirliği by using comparative methods. In the same way, the main female characters Meryemce and Irazca's hard struggles, feelings shaped by resistance, reactions to the events they experienced, and their relationship with other characters have been dealt with in the context of similarities. We tried to explain the sociocultural status of the village and the peasantry, the level of prosperity, the inner worlds of the individuals and their relations with the environment, which are conveyed by both authors within the framework of many themes, while at the same time enlightening the reader about the reflections of the period features on the life of the village. We created our study in six sections, which expanded with sub-headings, in accordance with the criteria of Comparative Literature Science.