Kemalettin Tuğcu’s Robinsonades and Intertextuality

Kemalettin Tuğcu was one of the most productive authors in Türkiye, having written almost 500 books for children featuring child protagonists. Alongside his main concern with the orphans who have to grapple with poverty, deprivation, neglect, and lack of opportunities, he also penned four novellas about the people who are stranded on uninhabited islands. Çocuklar Adası, Maymunlar Adası, Pasifikte Bir Türk Genci, and Tekinsiz Ada have intertextual links with castaway narratives, Robinsonades, in other literatures through their plots, characters, themes, settings, and narration. Despite his best-selling fiction and his significant effect on the children in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, there has not been any study on these books and their genealogy. The aim of this study is to explore intertextual resonances in Çocuklar Adası, Maymunlar Adası, Pasifikte Bir Türk Genci, and Tekinsiz Ada with the canonical Robinsonades; Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, The Coral Island by R.M. Ballantyne, Swiss Family Robinson by Johann Wyss, and Two Years’ Vacation by Julius Verne. The study concludes that although Tuğcu’s Robinsonades have strong intertextual correspondence with the genre, his novellas localise and expand the content of the Robinsonade genre with the culturally, morally, temporally, historically, and spatially different fiction by a Turkish author who creates Turkish-Robinsonades.