Method in Turkish Literary History

Abstract

This is a translation of Mehmed Fuad Köprülü's (1890 – 1966) essay ‘Türk edebiyatı tarihinde usûl’, which originally appeared in Ottoman Turkish in the journal Bilgi mecmuası, 1 (1339/1913), pp. 3 – 52. It was later republished in the Latin alphabet and in ‘modernized’ Turkish in a volume of Köprülü's articles entitled Edebiyat araştırmaları[Research on (Turkish) literature] (Ankara 1966, rpt, 1986), pp. 3 – 47. Köprülü was the founder of the modern study of Turkish literature. In this essay, his first scholarly work, he described, in general, method in historical research and method in research on the history of literature. More specifically, he described late 19th-century French thought on method in the history of literature and its applicability to the history of Turkish literature. He followed this with a discussion of the special problems of doing research on the history of Turkish literature. This essay was a benchmark in the establishment of the modern study of Turkish literature and in the development of 20th-century Turkish intellectual history.