Harvill Press Research Articles

The Representations of Kurdish Women in Selected Turkish Novels

The representations of minorities by the mainstream writers have frequently been viewed negatively. The depiction has been of a major concern to the literary writings. However, the representations of Kurdish women in Turkish literary works has rarely been tackled in scholarly papers and researches. Generally, the life of a Kurdish woman is molded by patriarchal practices, traditions, and customs that govern all social zones, rather than the legal rights. The patriarchal ideologies embedded in women’s mind make them believe that they could do nothing but what is expected from them; to be submissive and obedient.This research paper focuses on the representation of the Kurdish women in selected modern Turkish novels by three particular Turkish novelists: Honor (Penguin, 2012) by Elif Shafak written in English language ; Face to Face by Ayşe Kulin (Everest, 2006) written in Turkish ; The Legend of Ararat ( Collins and Harvill Press, 197) by Yashar Kemal written in Turkish . The research aims at selecting a variety of authors based on gender, ethnicity, Language and region. Yashar Kemal, is a Turkish writer of a Kurdish origin from Gökçedam, a village in the southern province of Osmaniya; Elif Shafak, is a Turkish-British writer who lives abroad and Ayşe Kulin, a woman writer from Istanbul. By means of textual analysis, the study investigates the representation of Kurdish women in these texts. Through a comparative approach, the paper endeavors to examine the ways in which the selected authors depict the Kurdish women and their social predicaments in their fictional works. Moreover, it investigates the images and conditions these authors depict to the mainstream Turkish readers as well as to the public readers in the rest of the world. This is portrayed through the construction of specific female characters that enhances a stereotype Kurdish women, who are powerless, submissive, ignorant and victims of the patriarch Kurdish society in southwest Turkey. It also explore the diversity in the authors' representation; the sympathetic to the Kurds, challenging the stereotypes viewpoints of the Kurdish women or the negative image and the harsh representation that includes depicting misconceptions and defects in the construction of the Kurdish identity and social structure. The women in the novels are presented as victims of the gender-based system simply for having been born female; they are marginalized and discriminated against in a variety of ways.

BJGP Library: A Country Doctor's Notebook: A Lone Soldier of Reason.

A Country Doctor’s Notebook Mikhail Bulgakov Vintage Classics, 2010, PB, 160pp, £7.99, 978-0099529569 I doubt whether A Country Doctor’s Notebook by Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov was on the reading list I received between my A levels and starting my medical studies. Several of its chapters were published in Russian magazines in the 1920s, but they were not collated until the 1960s, and the book was translated into English in 1975 (published in the UK by Collins & Harvill press), so it had not long been available. It’s a career too late now, and perhaps it would have been better to read before applying to medical school anyway. Maybe not, though. Some of its power resides in resonances and contrasts with the life I have lived. It would have made a worthy alternative to The Citadel by AJ Cronin, …

The Lists of W. G. Sebald

The Lists of W. G. Sebald

Science and the cultural imaginary: the case of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

When Kazuo Ishiguro's sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, was published in 2005, it was extensively reviewed as one would expect of the work by an author whose previous oeuvre has been widely acclaimed a...

Claudio Magris: Danube. Translated from Italian by Patrick Creagh (Paperback edition). London: The Harvill Press. 2001. 416 pp. $13.50

This article is a book review about Claudi Magris' book, Danube, which presents an engaging journey along the Danube River. Claudio Magris guides the reader from the river’s source in the Bavarian hills through Austro-Hungary and the Balkans to its mouth at the Black Sea. The book is unique in its successful intertwining of travel impressions, prose, historical insights and philosophical reflection.

Book Reviews : Happy Moscow. By Andrey Platonov. Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, with Angela Livingstone, Nadya Bourova and Eric Naiman with an Introduction by Eric Naiman. London: The Harvill Press, 2001. Pp. xxxvii + 154. £9.99. A Hundred Years of Andrei Platonov (first volume of Platonov special issue of Essays in Poetics, autumn 2001, volume 26). Guest editor

Book Reviews : Happy Moscow. By Andrey Platonov. Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, with Angela Livingstone, Nadya Bourova and Eric Naiman with an Introduction by Eric Naiman. London: The Harvill Press, 2001. Pp. xxxvii + 154. £9.99. A Hundred Years of Andrei Platonov (first volume of Platonov special issue of Essays in Poetics, autumn 2001, volume 26). Guest editor

James Hanley and the Project of Modernity

The writing of this paper was prompted by the recent publication by Harvill Press of The Last Voyage and Other Stories, an anthology which brings together Hanley’s earliest published shorter fiction from the 1930s. Two of these two stories – ‘The German Prisoner’ and ‘A Passion Before Death’ – were privately printed owing to the prevailing prohibitions on representations of sexuality. Hanley was originally an ‘ordinary seaman’ who subsequently built a reputation as a writer on his stories and novels of the sea-going working class. However, such an identity masks a diversity evident in his work from its inception and which developed over some fifty years, beginning with the publication of his first novel, Drift (1930) a narrative of unemployment and Catholic anguish in contemporary Liverpool. The five stories in The Last Voyage, of which three are directly concerned with maritime life, are a reflection of Hanley’s range, yet they all bear the traces of his preoccupations and tendency – compulsion even – to focus on the extremes of contemporary working-class experience.

Adventures on the Freedom Road: The French Intellectuals in the 20th Century (review)

Book Reviews Bernard-Henri Levy. Adventures on the Freedom Road: The French Intellectuals in the 20th Century. London: The Harvill Press, 1995. xi + 433 pp. £20.00 (cloth). Bernard-Henri Levy, one of the principal "nouveaux philosophes" of post-1968 French thought, began his most renowned book—Barbarism with a Human Face of 1977— with the dramatic line, "I am the bastard child of an unholy union between fascism and Stalinism." The line sums up the ongoing project of Bernard-Henry Levy in style, form, and content, and this remains the preface to the cultural situation he wishes to elucidate as well as to some of the problems with his own work. The present work begins as one breezy book; cool and vaguely impious. One might capitulate almost immediately to Levy's carnivalesque view of the often nasty ideological contortions of 20th-century French intellectuals, and then go along for the ride. Allow the tale (the "commedia dell'arte," as Levy sometimes refers to it) its tragi-comic adventure, the long introduction appears to ask seductively. Once beyond the introduction, however, it is clear that this is a book about ideology—the "adventures" of the title—and the continued attempt to come to terms with the complex and contradictory intellectual legacy to which Levy finds himself inextricably indebted: but "[tjhere again, one cannot choose one's family" (146). Lesser-known names drop quite casually throughout this book so it may read more smoothly for those familiar with the French intellectual and political milieu. It is nonetheless a contemporary history of ideas with Levy's swashbuckling stylistic flair for viewing history in all its "seething and cataclysmic chaos" (294): "the history of ideas is dreadful, like being in a quagmire . . . like watching the movements of an eel. It lunges forward, retracts, coils round on itself, stretches out, and then draws back again" (347). This book— although we might say it is not a "book," as Levy asserts of Althusser's works—is comprised of the more public form of interviews (with Claude Simon, Klossowski, LévyStrauss , Barthes, Foucault, and others), occasionally fascinating historical anecdotes, and often astute interpretations of research and experience. Levy's story encompasses the "adventures" of the Dreyfus Affair, Stalinism, Nazism, Vichy, the war in Algeria, and the after-effects of May 1968, as well as the silly vituperation of the surrealists, the bizarrely contradicting versions of Althusser's character supplied by Jean Guitton and Stanislas Breton, and other tales of the absurd or at least of hypotheses that have the "great merit" of "the plausibility of fiction" (240). Levy is alternately clever (quoting Roland Gary: "The only thing that counts is whether or not one is quoted, and I'm one of the truly damned who isn't" [95]), self-critical, and self-inflating. The book is perhaps best read for its interviews and the insights gleaned from its informally biographical aspects. And yet, it is a rather strangely convoluted book with the melancholy aesthetic of a fin-de-siècle spirit, especially given the ongoing tragedies of the century and perhaps given the not uncommon French inquietude regarding cultural stagnation in its years of waning socialism. Levy's brief discussion of writers and the Dreyfus Affair serves to outline the antisemitism -versus-integrity (neither of which is monopolized by the Right nor the Left) that will inform much of French thought throughout the century and define the meaning of "intellectual." For the first time, he claims, the conditions were such that "it was necessary for individuals to find the courage to proclaim themselves intermediaries between universal values and the everyday world" (56). Many of these mediators or "priests" will transform themselves throughout the century, André Malraux being perhaps the paradigmatic case of those whose writing eventually takes secondary status to the near religious commitment to 90 Summer 1997 Book Reviews adventures of the political and the heroic. As Levy repeats in various contexts, "what we desperately need are theologians who can interpret this phenomenon" (358). Most particularly, however, this book is an attempt to elicit the various extents to which intellectuals themselves have been compliantly blinkered ideologically, and how "the God of the history of ideas...

The Poet. By Yi Mun-Yol. Translated by Chong-Wha Chung and Brother Anthony of Taize. London: The Harvill Press, 1995. xv, 207 pp. $24.00 (cloth).

The Poet. By Yi Mun-Yol. Translated by Chong-Wha Chung and Brother Anthony of Taize. London: The Harvill Press, 1995. xv, 207 pp. $24.00 (cloth).

M. Hayward, Writers in Russia: 1917-1978. Edited and with an Introduction by Patricia Blake. London, Harvill Press, 1983. 23 × 15, LXXVI-340 p., f 7,95.

M. Hayward, Writers in Russia: 1917-1978. Edited and with an Introduction by Patricia Blake. London, Harvill Press, 1983. 23 × 15, LXXVI-340 p., f 7,95.

Reviews

The International Sakharov Hearing edited by Marta Harasowska and Orest Olhovych. Smoloskyp Publishers, Baltimore, Toronto, 1977, 335 pp., no index, $8.95. Basket III: Implementation of the Helsinki Accords (Hearing before the Commission on Security and Co‐operation in Europe, Ninety‐Fifth [US] Congress, Second Session on the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords) Vol. VII, Repercussions of the Trials of the Helsinki Monitors in the USSR, 11 July, 1978, US Government Printing Office, 1978, 112 pp., $2.50. Alarm and Hope by Andrei D. Sakharov, edited by Efrim Yankelevich and Alfred Friendly, Jr, Collins and Harvill Press, London, 1979, xix + 200 pp., hardback £5.50. A Captive of Time—My Years with Pasternak by Olga Ivinskaya. Translated by Max Hayward, Harvill Press, 1978, 488 pp., £7.50. (Russian text: U Vremeni v Plenu, Fayard, Paris, 1978.)

Book Reviews : The Kremlin's Dilemma: The Struggle for Human Rights in Eastern Europe by Tufton Beamish and Guy Hadley. Collins & Harvill Press £5.95

Book Reviews : The Kremlin's Dilemma: The Struggle for Human Rights in Eastern Europe by Tufton Beamish and Guy Hadley. Collins & Harvill Press £5.95

The River People, by Philip Wayre. Collins & Harvill Press, £3.95.

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MANDELSTAM

Journal Article MANDELSTAM Get access Mandelstam. By CLARENCE BROWN. Cambridge University Press, 1973; £4.75. Selected Poems. By OSIP MANDELSTAM. Translated by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin. Oxford University Press, 1973; £2.50. Selected Poems. By OSIP MANDEL'SHTAM. Translated from the Russian by David McDuff. Rivers Press, Cambridge, 1973; £2.25. Hope Abandoned: A Memoir. By NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM. Translated from the Russian by Max Hayward. Collins and Harvill Press, 1974; £5.00. HENRY GIFFORD HENRY GIFFORD University of Bristol Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Essays in Criticism, Volume XXIV, Issue 4, October 1974, Pages 406–416, https://doi.org/10.1093/eic/XXIV.4.406 Published: 01 October 1974

Vicky: Princess Royal of England and German Empress. By Daphne Bennett. London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1971. Pp. 382. £3·50.

Vicky: Princess Royal of England and German Empress. By Daphne Bennett. London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1971. Pp. 382. £3·50.

The Shamba Raiders, by Bruce Kinloch. Collins and Harvill Press, £3.50.

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Reviews

A Basic Work on Judaism in the USSR The Jewish Religion in the Soviet Union, by Joshua Rothenberg. New York, Ktav (in association with Philip W. Lown Graduate Center for Contemporary Jewish Studies, Brandeis University). 1971. 242 pp. A Volume of Moscow Sermons Bameitzar Birchat Hazan. Hadranim Vederashot (From Confinement — Praise to the Provider. Teachings and Sermons), by Zalman Nathan Kiselgof. Jerusalem, Mossad Harav Kook. 1970. 320 pp. The Mandelstam Memoir and the Russian‐Jewish Intelligentsia Hope against hope, a memoir, Nadezhda Mandelstam. (Tr. from Russian by Max Hayward.) New York, Atheneum Publishers, and London, Harvill Press Ltd. 1970. xiii, 431 pp. Illus. Index. $10.00; £3.15. A Yiddish Documentary Novel on Russian Camp Life In Wieser Farfalenkeit (In White Hopelessness), by Jechiel Hofer. Tel‐Aviv, Hamenora Publishing House. 1969. 423 pp. Sorsfordulo. Iratok Magyarorszag Felszabadulasanak Tortenetehez. 1944 September, 1945 Aprilis (The Turn of Fates. Documents on the History of Hungary's Liberation. September 1944‐April 1945), by Elek Karsai and Magda Solymar (eds). Introduction by Magda Solymar, notes and information by Elek Karsai. Budapest. 1970. Two volumes. 1, 144 pp.

Review Notices : Shipwreck of a Generation. The Memoirs of Joseph Berger. London: Harvill Press. 1971. 286 pp. £2.50

Review Notices : Shipwreck of a Generation. The Memoirs of Joseph Berger. London: Harvill Press. 1971. 286 pp. £2.50

Involuntary Journey to Siberia

Journal Article Involuntary Journey to Siberia Get access Involuntary Journey to Siberia. By Andrei Amalrik. Trans. by Manya Harari and Max Hayward. London: Collins & Harvill Press. 1970. 282 pp. £2.25. Marcus Wheeler Marcus Wheeler Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 48, Issue 1, January 1972, Pages 131–132, https://doi.org/10.2307/2613672 Published: 01 January 1972

Vanier: Soldier, Diplomat and Governor-General. A Biography

Journal Article Vanier: Soldier, Diplomat and Governor-General. A Biography Get access Vanier: Soldier, Diplomat and Governor-General. A Biography. By Robert Speaight. London: Collins and Harvill Press. 1970. 488 pp. Index. £3.50. Ronald Fredenburgh Ronald Fredenburgh Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 47, Issue 3, July 1971, Pages 654–655, https://doi.org/10.2307/2614519 Published: 01 July 1971