Major Studies on Letter as a Literary Genre in Turkish Literature

Abstract

Aside from being a manner of expression, letter is a literary genre. There are two types of letters. One is private and the other one is official letters. Official letters come out of the correspondences between public and private sectors or within the same sectors. On the other hand private letters are the products of the correspondences between family members, relatives, friends, colleagues etc. Even though it is difficult to categorize all the letters written on history, politics, philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, religion and literature which can shed light on the era in which they are written, they are obviously great archival documents. Literary letters are articles, critiques, essays, diaries and memoirs that are most of the time written in the form of a letter. As a literary genre letters have the characteristic of leaking into other literary genres such as stories, novels and even poetry. Despite the hardship of categorization of such thematically scattered letters, the multitude of academic and critical researches on them creates a better and wider ground for new readings.