Forms of Melancholy in Modern Kurdish Novels

(Hardback)

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Forms of Melancholy in Modern Kurdish Novels investigates the specific uses of the melancholy motif in modern Kurdish novels, aiming to understand how melancholy is appropriated as a multi-functional literary device by Kurdish novelists to articulate a broad spectrum of subjectivities often mediated by contexts of Kurdish socio-political reality. Dedicating particular attention to the socio-political allusions inscribed in melancholy motifs by the texts, the study highlights the congruity between the socio-political reality of Kurds in Turkey and the melancholic subjectivities fashioned by their novelists; it proposes connections in between melancholy conceived as a form of loss-oriented affect and the historical and socio-political reality by attempting to trace these in texts markedly revolving around loss, mourning and melancholy. Drawing attention to the instrumentality of melancholy as a motif in this way, the findings of the present study not only highlight the distinct cultural and artistic function the melancholy literature has attained in different literary traditions, but at the same time, improves the understanding of non-Western melancholic subjectivities shaped in distinct colonial settings.

Author Bio

Ahmet Atas is an independent scholar