Animals and the Environment in Turkish Culture : Ecocriticism and Transnational Literature

"Landscape and animals have been fundamental elements of Turkish culture from the Ottomans to the present day. This book examines representations of and attitudes toward land and animals in selected Turkish literary texts and cultural contexts. Informed by global debates in ecocriticism, ecopoetics and animal studies, Kim Fortuny explores literary and arts activism, as well as environmental interventions in the Turkish cultural sphere in light of ongoing ecological degradation in Turkey. Writers from the Turkish canon such as Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar and Nâzim Hikmet are explored alongside American and English texts to reveal common transnational environmental and ecological concerns across these distinct literary cultures. Analysing works of Turkish literature within the emerging field of ecocriticism, this interdisciplinary work will be of interest to scholars of Turkish and comparative literature and animal studies and ecocriticism across the humanities."--Bloomsbury Publishing. Landscape and animals have been fundamental elements of Turkish culture from the Ottomans to the present day. This book examines representations of and attitudes toward land and animals in selected Turkish literary texts and cultural contexts. Informed by global debates in ecocriticism, ecopoetics and animal studies, Kim Fortuny explores literary and arts activism, as well as environmental interventions in the Turkish cultural sphere in light of ongoing ecological degradation in Turkey. Writers from the Turkish canon such as Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar and Nazim Hikmet are explored alongside American and English texts to reveal common transnational environmental and ecological concerns across these distinct literary cultures. Analysing works of Turkish literature within the emerging field of ecocriticism, this interdisciplinary work will be of interest to scholars of Turkish and comparative literature and animal studies and ecocriticism across the humanities Cover Contents Acknowledgments Permissions and Grant Acknowledgments Introduction Part 1 Land 1 Herman Melville’s Near East Journal and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s Five Cities: Affinities of Culture, Nature, and Islamic Mysticism in Istanbul 2 Nature’s Place in Political Romanticism: Selected Poems by Nâzım Hikmet 3 Resourcing Nature: Land Ethics, Poetics, and “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved” by Nâzım Hikmet Part 2 Animals 4 Islam, Westernization, and Post-Humanist Place: The Case of the Istanbul Street Dog 5 Ecopoetics, Dead Metaphors, and Bird Migration: The Bosporus Passage of the European White Stork 6 The Benefits of Doubt: A Sea Turtle and the Ecological Sublime Afterword Notes Bibliography Index