Nostalgia for province: Genre boundaries in Anatolian Armenian authors writing in Turkish

This study analyses the works of three Armenian writers, Mıgırdiç Margosyan, Kirkor Ceyhan and Agop Arslanyan. The main claim of the study is that these works have ambiguous genre boundaries and are quite open to interpretation. In this context, it is claimed that two main factors are effective in the genre problem. On the one hand, the Catastrophe attributed a central importance to the authors' selves as "survivors" and made them a part of the narrative. In this respect, it is important that the authors transferred their selves into the text due to the trauma and that 1915 rendered literature problematic. Thus, the authors' making themselves a part of the text made the distinction between fiction and reality invisible. The second factor is more related to the conditions of the writing of the text (narrative time). Especially in the 1990s, when the importance of local identities was emphasised in Turkey, marginalised identities were put at the centre, and the unifying and exclusionary attitude of nationalism was shaken, Armenian writers wrote these texts and the content was shaped accordingly. Therefore, the authors attempted to reflect this reality to the Turkish readers of the period by transforming the nostalgic reality into fiction and writing in Turkish.