Animals, Plants, and Landscapes

The landscape of Turkey, with its trees and animals inspires narratives of survival, struggle and escape. Animals, Plants, and Landscapes: An Ecology of Turkish Literature and Film, will be the first major study to offer fresh theoretical insight into this landscape, by offering a collection of analyses of key texts of Turkish literature and cinema. Through discussion of both classical and contemporary works, this volume, paves the way for the formation of a ecocritical canon in Turkish literature and the rise of certain themes that are unique to Turkish experience. Snakes, fishermen and fish who catch men, porcupines contemplating on human agency, dogs exiled on an island and men who put dogs to fights, goat herders and windy steppes of Anatolia are all agents in a territory that constantly shifts. The essays included in this volume demonstrate the ways in which the crystallized relations between human and non-human form, break, and transform.

Hande Gurses is a lecturer at the Comparative Literature Program, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Irmak Ertuna Howison received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Binghamton University. Her teaching and research interests include feminist crime fiction, science fiction and fantasy, literary theory and criticism.

Introduction: Critical Perspectives on Ecocriticism, World Literature, and Pedagogies PART I: Anatolian Landscapes, History, Gender, and Trauma 1. "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia": The Enfolding-Unfolding Aesthetics of Confronting the Past in Turkey 2. Grape Gatherers and Goat Herders: The Portrayal of Anatolian Village Women's Interaction with the Natural Environment in Contemporary Turkish Film PART 2: Non-Human Subjectivities 3. Human Violence, Nature and Poetry in Murathan Mungan's Sair'in Romani (The Poet's Novel) 4. Rethinking the Subject, Reimagining Worlds in Bilge Karasu's A Long Day's Evening and Sema Kaygusuz's The Sultan and the Poet 5. Writing Beyond the Species Boundary: Bilge Karasu's The Garden of Departed Cats and Sema Kaygusuz's Wine and Gold PART 3: Animals of/as Sovereignty 6. Dogs of Modernity 7. Violence and the Validation of Male Identities Through Canine Others in Kaan Mujdeci's Sivas (2014) and Emin Alper's Frenzy (Abluka, 2015) 8. Encounter with Snakes in Fakir Baykurt's Yilanlarin Öcü (Revenge of the Snakes)