Microsoft Word 1 Arif thesis cover final doc

CHAPTER 3 – SOME TOPOI IN THE KURTULUŞ EDEBİYATI 
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claiming that the “War of Independence is implicitly present and operative in the 
novel”
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and concluding that “Güntekin presents the path to a unified nation”
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. The 
argument, which involves a dialectic, somewhat hard to follow, between maleness, 
femaleness and castrated maleness, seems to rest on the unargued assertion of a 
certain symbolism: that the brutal husband of Manastırlı Hanım represents 
Abdulhamid II, because he too was cruel or that Doctor Hayrullah Bey represents 
Mustafa Kemal, because the latter cured the sick man of Europe
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. Even more 
startling is the attribution to Jesus Christ, Mustafa Kemal, Hüseyin and the Prophet 
Muhammed of a merger of femininity with masculinity. The key seems to be the 
possession of blue eyes and blond hair and in this characteristic Jesus Christ (as a 
picture of him is recalled in the novel, whatever the colours of the historical Jesus) 
and Mustafa Kemal are joined by some characters in the novel, for example the 
Mother Superior of Feride’s convent school, Şeyh Yusuf, Munise, Sarı Çicek and 
Necdet. Mustafa Kemal does not make an appearance in the novel and so he can only 
be introduced into the argument by dint of his blue eyes and blond hair; although he 
indeed had blue eyes and blond hair one can wonder how widely this was known in 
1922. Erol refers us
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to some lines from Nazım Hikmet
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in support but these were 
written in the 1940s and not published until the 1960s. Beyond all this, the toponym, 
Anadolu, must also be decomposed into “Ana-dolu and Dolu-Ana (Mother-filled, 
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Erol, 72 
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Erol, 82 
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Erol, 75 
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Erol, 25 
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Hikmet, 605 

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