The Abname as a Literary Genre in Turkish Classical Poetry

Abstract

In order to be able to make a genre description among the works of Classical Turkish Literature like `abname`i there are no enough sources within this scope. Even though `abname`has been given descriptions in some encyclopedic sources like `the poems on water`, it is obvious that much more knowledge and literary work are needed to be explored regarding the above mentioned expression. The biggest difficulty in the terming of `abname` as a genre is that the number of texts directly related to water among works of Classical Turkish Literature are little if any. The other problem is that the settled texts have not directly dealt with the case `water`, quite the contrary, the case `water` has been used in these texts as a figurative component. In this article we investigated poems on water gotten from divans and we also traced terming problems of `abname` as a genre. Also, the mesneviii called Yenisehirli Avni Bey’s `Abname` has been analyzed in terms of literary genres and styles.