This article is based on a close reading of five meticulously selected literary works from the late Ottoman and early Republican periods, chosen from a broader pool of dozens of novels, novellas, and serialized stories that were published in Ottoman Turkish between the 1870s and 1920s. During this transformative period, Ottoman literature saw the rise of modern prose forms, including the introduction of crime fiction and dime novels, which became significant platforms for negotiating themes of gender, morality, and modernity.
While many works featured marginal or symbolic female characters, only a limited number placed female perpetrators at the center of their narratives. After an extensive survey of the period’s literary production, I selected five representative texts that not only span this fifty-year timeframe but also reflect distinct ideological, narrative, and stylistic shifts: İntibah (1876) by Namık Kemal, Esrar-ı Cinâyat (1884) by Ahmet Mithat, Milli Cinâyat Koleksiyonu (1914) by Vassaf Kadri and Süleyman Sudi, and two early Republican dime novels by Peyami Safa, Tilki Leman (1926) and Çekirge Zehra (1928).
These works were chosen for their diverse portrayals of female criminality and their roles in reflecting or subverting dominant social values. Through detailed textual analysis, my research uncovers the literary construction of women’s deviance and the cultural meanings it carries across changing historical contexts.
This research makes several significant contributions to both literary and gender studies by examining the representation of female criminality in Ottoman and early Republican Turkish literature. One of the primary achievements is the identification of a thematic and narrative evolution in how female perpetrators were portrayed from the Tanzimat era through the early Republican period. By analyzing five carefully selected works across five decades, the study reveals how early literature often marginalized, pathologized, or demonized criminal women, while later works—especially those influenced by dime novel culture—allowed for more complex, autonomous, and visible female criminal figures.
A second key contribution is the integration of feminist criminological theory into Ottoman literary analysis. This interdisciplinary approach challenges the male-centric assumptions of both classical criminology and Ottoman prose fiction by highlighting how gendered perceptions shaped not only legal and social treatment of women, but also their symbolic roles in fiction. The research uncovers how literature both reflected and reinforced dominant ideologies of femininity, morality, and power.
Furthermore, the study introduces and contextualizes dime novels as a transformative genre in Ottoman-Turkish literary history, showing how their sensationalist and serialized structure created new spaces for imagining female agency—albeit often in exaggerated or ambivalent ways.
Finally, by foregrounding underexplored texts and female characters, this research expands the canon of Ottoman-Turkish literature and opens new avenues for rethinking the relationship between gender, crime, and cultural representation. It provides a framework for understanding how literature functioned as a tool of both social control and subtle resistance.
