Forms of Melancholy in Modern Kurdish Novels

Forms of Melancholy in Modern Kurdish Novels presents a critical literary analysis of narrative forms used in Kurdish novels that articulate loss, mourning, and melancholia.

Based on a range of perspectives on questions of loss, mourning, and melancholia, this study elucidates how melancholy is appropriated as a multi-functional literary device by Kurdish novelists to articulate a broad spectrum of subjectivities often mediated by political and socio-cultural reality. Adapting an interdisciplinary approach, Ahmet Atas situates Kurdish melancholy narratives within broader scholarly discussions on loss and melancholia. Atas demonstrates how melancholy is utilized as an effective artistic device by Kurdish writers to stage not only the grief of an oppressed nation, but its political and cultural resistances. Providing an original case study, this book illuminates how melancholy literature acquires unique political and cultural functions, missions, and meanings in contrasting colonial and postcolonial settings.