The literature of the Turks is among the oldest of those of living literatures. In nearly twelve centuries, it has been alive in many continents and regions, expressing itself in a diversity of languages and scripts, and remaining receptive to the external influences as well as maintaining its intrinsic impetus for renewal. From Central Asia to Anatolia and beyond, it has served as a faithful mirror of Turkish societies and cultures, often functioning as a vehicle for pioneering ideas and ideals. As such, Turkish literature is both a repository of time-honored values and a powerful catalyst for change. Its main emphasis is on Seljuk, Ottoman, and modern Turkish literature as well as on Central Asian roots.
Turkish literature comprises both oral compositions and written texts in the Turkish language, either in its Ottoman form or in less exclusively literary forms, such as that spoken in the Republic of Turkey today. The Ottoman Turkish language, which forms the basis of much of the written corpus, was influenced by Persian and Arabic and used a variant of the Perso-Arabic script. Throughout most of its history, Turkish literature has been rather sharply divided into two rather different traditions, neither of which exercised much influence upon the other until the 19th century. The first of these two traditions are Turkish folk literature, and the second is Turkish written literature. Turkish literature is among the world's oldest-and youngest-literatures. Its creative tradition, according to the claims of numerous scholars, dates back to before Christ. It is commonly accepted that its legacy of written works spans close to thirteen centuries.
The Turkish novel appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the 1870's. This was a time of weakness and disintegration for the Ottoman Empire, for the past two hundred years, the empire was losing wars and its economic stability. In hopes of saving the empire from total ruin, the government and the intellectuals of the time were working towards social and political changes that came in the shape of westernization. Actually, westernization started in the eighteenth century, when taking technical knowledge in the military area from the West was seen as a necessity. In the 1980s, following the footsteps of Tanpinar and Atay, Orhan Pamuk (1952-), the voice of the intellectual, appeared in whose novels one could not find a one-to-one correlation with social problems and political issues but only an indication of them. This was very atypical of the Turkish novel in general, which usually had a clear political standing. Under the auspices of fiction, dead men speak, and trees tell tales, feats displayed in the Ottoman otherworldliness are reflected in the books of Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk's diverse approach to be critically engaged in Turkey's perennial dilemma that is how to live in a westernized fashion in a country that is essentially Non-Western westernization project of his country in most of his novels. This issue of westernization has been and still is one of the most popular subjects of the Turkish novel. But Pamuk tries to deconstruct the binary opposition of East and West from the standpoint of a writer who is caught within this opposition as a twentieth century Turkish intellectual. His novels have been translated into many languages.
