A literature of quiet devastation: mapping the anxieties of modernisation in the fiction of Sabahattin Ali
Middle Eastern Literatures, 2026 (AHCI, Scopus)
- Publication Type: Article / Article
- Publication Date: 2026
- Doi Number: 10.1080/1475262x.2026.2694543
- Journal Name: Middle Eastern Literatures
- Journal Indexes: Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), Scopus, IBZ Online, Arab World Research Source, Index Islamicus, Jewish Studies Source, MLA - Modern Language Association Database, Religion and Philosophy Collection, Index to Jewish Periodicals, MLA International Bibliography, Academic Search Ultimate (EBSCO), Humanities Source Ultimate (EBSCO)
- Keywords: crisis of modernisation, cultural critique, Sabahattin Ali, Turkish literature
- Middle East Technical University Affiliated: Yes
Abstract
This article offers a thematic and sociopolitical reappraisal of Sabahattin Ali’s (1907–1948) fiction, tracing how it registers the anxieties of modernisation across social and intimate life. It argues that Ali’s work is structured by a persistent tension between social injustice and fragile interiority, moving from the short stories’ compressed depictions of bureaucracy, inequality, marginalisation, and unstable gendered roles to the novels’ fuller exploration of anxiety, estrangement, and quiet devastation. Through an analysis of his oeuvre, the article positions literature as evidence for how Turkey’s republican modernisation was absorbed, contested, and internalised in everyday experience. It situates Ali’s encounter with Weimar-era German intellectual life within cultural and linguistic disorientation rather than doctrinal influence. Finally, it revises reductive accounts of Ali as a straightforwardly Marxist writer, showing how his fiction refracts poverty, exploitation, and inequality through psychological realism rather than doctrinal exposition.