BILDUNGSROMAN’A TEMATİK BİR YAKLAŞIM: DAVID COPPERFIELD VE ÇALIKUŞU
A THEMATIC APPROACH TO BILDUNGSROMAN: DAVID COPPERFIELD & ÇALIKUŞU

Summary/Abstract: In this paper, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), from English literature, and Reşat Nuri Güntekin’s Çalıkuşu (1920), from Turkish literature, are analyzed through the Bildungsroman tradition which is also named as the novel of education, the novel of formation or the novel of artist. The reason why these two novels are subject to this study is that though they were written in different countries and periods they have similar thematic features. As a methodology, the thematic features of Bildungsroman in the Western literatures – which is a formative novel of a character from his/her youth to his/her maturity – is applied for the study. Therefore, initially the definition of Bildungsroman in Western literatures is given in the study and then according to the certain literary works on Bildungsroman, the general literary features of Bildungsroman are discussed in this paper. Later, the thematic features of David Copperfield and Çalıkuşu are elaborated respectively in the context of plot. In the last part of the paper, the thematic features and the plot structure observed in both novels are compared each other through the Bildungsroman tradition. As a result, it can be asserted that although the novel Çalıkuşu which is an important work of Turkish Literature, belongs to a different culture and period, it has the thematic features of Western Bildungsroman tradition in which David Copperfield is also included to a large extent, related to the theoretical discussion conducted in this study. The whole maturation process of the heroine observed in Çalıkuşu, as it is in David Copperfield, has an important role for achieving this result.

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