A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS IN THE CONTEXT OF LITERARY SOCIOLOGY: REFET AND JANE EYRE

Literary Sociology, which examines the relationship between literature and society, has been handled in a multifaceted way since the 1900s by providing readers new perspectives to evaluate the events in history. Feminism, for instance, has been an altering concept of literary canon and is one of the essential studies of literary sociology. Although it has been defined and evaluated in various ways, feminism refers to women’s struggle for equal rights and liberty. While the women’s movement emerged and accelerated in the Western societies at the beginning of the 19th century, it became efficiently prominent in the Turkish society and the culture after the reforms of the Tanzimat in 1839. Through a literary sociology framework, this study follows the traces of feministic improvements in the Victorian and the Tanzimat Periods: two groundbreaking periods of the British and the Turkish cultures. Written at times when feminism was discussed, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Fatma Aliye’s Refet (1898) represent women’s status with the new laws and regulations in the 19th century patriarchal societies. Therefore, within the scope of this study, Jane Eyre and Refet were comparatively analyzed to present a sociological interpretation of the British and Turkish cultures, regarding the women’s movements in the 19th century