Taner Can Knihy

This collection of new essays brings together scholarly examinations of a writer who—despite the prestige that the Nobel Prize has earned him—remains controversial with respect to his place in the literary tradition of his home country. This is in part because the positioning of Turkey itself in relation to the cultural divide between East and West has been the subject of a debate going back to the beginnings of the modern Turkish state and earlier. The present essays, written mostly by literary scholars, range widely across Pamuk’s novelistic oeuvre, dealing with how the writer, often adding an allegorical level to the personages depicted in his experimental narratives, portrays tensions such as those between Western secularism and traditional Islam and different conceptions of national identity.

This study aims at delineating the cultural work of magical realism as a dominant narrative mode in postcolonial British fiction through a detailed analysis of four magical realist novels: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight`s Children (1981), Shashi Tharoor`s The Great Indian Novel (1989), Ben Okri`s The Famished Road (1991), and Syl Cheney-Coker`s The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar (1990). The main focus of attention lies on the ways in which the novelists in question have exploited the potentials of magical realism to represent their hybrid cultural and national identities. To provide the necessary historical context for the discussion, the author first traces the development of magical realism from its origins in European Painting to its appropriation into literature by European and Latin American writers and explores the contested definitions of magical realism and the critical questions surrounding them. He then proceeds to analyze the relationship between the paradigmatic turn that took place in postcolonial literatures in the 1980s and the concomitant rise of magical realism as the literary expression of Third World countries.

Taner Can explores the prevailing problems of literary periodisation and canon formation in the history of English literary modernism. In his comprehensive survey of the development of modernist literary studies, he demonstrates that the current conception of English literary modernism and its established historical accounts are largely dominated by the exclusionary aesthetic perspective and restrictive critical assumptions that the early modernist writers deployed to define their art. Can seeks to redress this negative and marginalising historiography of modernism through a reassessment of Joseph Conrad’s literary career and achievements.