Milliyetçilik Araştırmaları Dergisi

Abstract

The emergence of the idea of Turkish nationalism as a concept in Ottoman lands coincides with the beginning of the 20th century, when the Ottoman Empire entered the process of disintegration. The nationalist movements experienced in the European continent after the French Revolution of 1789 deeply affected the Ottoman Empire, as did other great multinational empires, and many nations living in the Ottoman Empire engaged in separatist activities with the aim of establishing their own nation-states and were largely successful in this. The most important movement of thought put forward by Ottoman intellectuals to prevent or slow down separatist movements was nationalism, whose effects have continued to the present day and has been decisive in current political terms. It is possible to see one of the main reasons for the high sphere of influence of nationalist thought on political and cultural levels as the literary and politically influential texts written by intellectuals and artists who embraced this idea. One of the most important names who created a canon on the literary level with the texts he wrote about Turkish nationalism and left a permanent mark on the Turkish intellectual world is Omer Seyfettin. In this article, the book written by Atilla Aktaş on the influence of Omer Seyfettin in creating Turkish identity and nationalist discourse was examined and evaluated.