Toward a New Poetics: Literary Perspectives Articulated in Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem’s Takdîr-i Elhân and Pejmürde

Abstract

Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem, one of the leading writers of the Tanzimat era, wrote many non-fictional texts in which he clearly expressed his views on literature. The main source of the author’s influence on the literary generation that followed him is his literary criticism, which is why it should be studied more closely in order to better understand the period. Takdîr-i Elhân and Pejmürde are two of Ekrem’s most important theoretical works in which he comprehensively expressed his views on literature. In these two books, Ekrem described the methods and principles of how literature in the Western sense should be and he laid the foundations of a new poetics. The author dealt with the relationship between art and literature in a wider context. He also put forward some interpretations that differ from the traditional understanding on topics such as style, subjectivity, meter, and rhyme. However, these books, in which he expresses many important views about literature for the first time, have not been emphasized enough. This situation necessitates a study that takes a closer look at these two books. This article discusses Ekrem’s views on literature in Takdîr-i Elhân and Pejmürde within a holistic framework and shows the sources of the new poetics that he tried to establish.