History Studies (Nov 2022)
OTTOMAN STATE AND TURKEY IN ALEV LYTLE CROUTIER’S HISTORICAL NOVELS
Abstract
Internationally acclaimed Turkish-American writer Alev Lytle Croutier (aka Alev Aksoy) has a talent for interweaving history with fiction in a complex way. Her career as a writer began when she published her non-fiction work Harem: The World Behind the Veil in 1989. It was translated and published in more than twenty languages and countries, making her one of the most published woman writers of Turkish descent. This study seeks to explore how the spacelessness and spaciousness of expatriatism become the locus of multi-cultural space in the works of Alev Lytle Croutier. It concentrates on the recurring theme of placement, replacement, and displacement of the expatriate in Croutier’s works, The Palace of Tears (2000), Seven Houses (2002), and Üçüncü Kadın [The Third Woman] (2006). In The Palace of Tears, this theme is manifested in a French winemaker’s conversion into Islam and becoming a Turkish gentleman; in Seven Houses, it is presented in the return of a Turkish expatriate to her native land after years of cross-culturization; in Üçüncü Kadın, it is reflected in the interplay between the two French characters, Pierre Loti and Marc Helys’ Orientalisation and Zennur and Nuriye Hanim’s Europeanization and the deceptive mirroring.
