New Novel for the Old Village

In Erkan Irmak's Old Village New Novel, he discusses the history, origin and end of the "village novel" genre, which was influential in Turkey for a period. It focuses on the formation of the view of villages and peasants from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic, and therefore the generic difference between village novels and village-themed novels. He also elaborates this by breaking it down into a theoretical issue, the question of what a novel is and how village novels can be defined. It discusses how the novel genre can be distinguished from other literary genres, what its ontological and epistemological sources are, how different theoretical approaches put forward about the novel can be interpreted, and ultimately, at the end of these discussions, around which features the idea of a "village novel" can be framed. Erkan Irmak, on the one hand, tries to create a guide to the "history of the village novel" in a period extending from 1950 to 1980, and on the other hand, creates a source that discusses the village novel genre in detail.