The notion of city in Tanpınar, Priestley and James

The city and urbanization have been the subject of many fields as well as the object of literature, and the perceptions of the city by writers from various countries have often found a place in their works. This study aims to examine the perception of the city in certain works of important writers of Turkish, English and American literature, and in this context, the works of three different writers focusing on their travels in their own countries have been examined. For this purpose, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's Beş Şehir (1946), John Boynton Priestley's The English Journey (1933) and Henry James' The American Scene (1907) novels have been determined. In the study, how the representations of the architectural, historical and cultural elements of the cities that are the objects of these works construct the writers' perception of the city is examined, and the ways in which all three writers represent these elements are analyzed. In order to reveal the perception of the city in the works in the thesis, the relevant city depictions are examined from a Marxist perspective, peripheral city, travel literature and literary journalism, and are also examined in terms of time and space. In this context, the socio-cultural changes in the cities that are the objects of the relevant works and the unique situations that arise from the peripherality of these cities have been determined, and the reflection of the concepts of city and urbanization and the city-literature relationship in the works have been revealed. Thus, using the aforementioned theories and concepts, this thesis examines and compares the basic elements such as history, culture and architecture that are at the center of the perceptions of three writers from three different countries about the cities they observed during their travels, and reveals their representations within the framework of literature. This approach allows a detailed examination of the perception of the city in the works of Tanpınar, Priestley and James.