Halide Edip Adivar ve Lady Augusta Gregory: Ulus-devlet kimliğinin edebi yansımaları

This study examines the roles of Halide Edib Adıvar and Lady Augusta Gregory in the promotion of cultural identity in the formation process of their countries as nation-states, reflected in their nationalist discourse and peasantist ideology. By mainly focusing on their roles as anti-imperialists with the emphasis on their political struggles, contributions to war history and female activism this is a comparative study of their roles as social reformers, contributors to cultural nationalism and the development of theatre, and pioneers in the re-envisioning of their new nation-states. This thesis aims to demonstrate that Lady Augusta Gregory and Halide Edib Adıvar used literature both as a means to examine the imposed ideology of English colonialism and other dictatorial regimes, and as a lens through which to promote a new national consciousness and cultural identity, based on the former national heritage. The thesis will explore how the anti-imperial stances of Lady Gregory and Halide Edib shaped or influenced their sense of national identity, investigate the ways how they took a critical stance against British colonialism and expose how their subjective elaborations and interrogations of anti-colonial nationalisms in other countries were influential on the reinforcement of their sense of "nationhood". Accordingly, I will investigate the similar nationalist ideals of contemporaneous Halide Edib Adıvar and Lady Augusta Gregory as anti-imperialist social reformers with a focus on maintaining national values and traditions as part of resistance against cultural imperialism. In this study I will search for answers to the questions: 1) What were Halide Edib's and Lady Gregory's contributions to the debates of nation building through cultural and literary revival; 2) How were they positioned by their contemporaries politically; 3) How were their changing political ideas influenced by international events and transnational encounters particularly, 4) What were their influences on the creation of a new woman identity; and finally 5) How do these female writers deal with the problems of engaging with nationalist discourses often defined in masculinist terms in their different contexts. The transnational encounters and exchanges of Gregory and Adıvar led them to gain an appreciation of nationalism in local sense with an international outlook of anti-imperialism. The thesis will analyse the components of national identity such as gender, language, and transnational exchanges, by showing how they shaped Lady Gregory and Halide Edib's ideas of nationalism.