From historical figure to literary character: The representation of religious women figures in literary texts

In this thesis, I will dwell on how female figures who are prominent with their religious representation and have historicity were constructed and the role of the author's ideology and biography, the genre of the text and also the conditions and politics of the period on this construction procedure. Thus, I will try to comprehend how religious female figures were reconstructed, transformed and differentiated by every rewriting without detaching the text from its context. To that end, I will discuss the female authors' works through discourse analysis and close reading techniques while tracing religious female figures from Tanzimat period to recent period. Therefore, while analyzing the historical figures' functionality in genre and transformation, I will try to illustrate how the characters with historicity have transformed into literary character.