This entry covers issues of representations of women and gender – the forms, themes, and dimensions of these depictions, the kind of images, stereotypes, and models they provide, and their local and historical context – in modern Turkish poetry.

After the foundation of the Republic of Turkey (1923) the process of modernization began with social and economic reforms. In poetry, the divan poetry, written in Arabo-Persian letters of prosody (ʿaruz), could not be taken as a model any more. But the folk poetry in syllabic meter could serve as a starting point for mode…