Literary Genres vis-à-vis: Novel-Masnavi and the Position of the Narrator

This article aims to focus on the problem of whether masnavi, one of the most significant narrative forms in Ottoman poetry, and novel, as a narrative form that became popular in Ottoman literature through the Westernization period, are interrelated. In masnavi, the lack of rhyme relations between beyits and a limit for the number of beyits provide poets with the opportunity to extend the subject they write on, and in this way, masnavi became one of the favourite narrative forms in Ottoman poetry. In spite of the fact that there are many masnavi types such as religious, sufistic, humorous, moral, didactive, epic etc., romantic masnavis - since they include elements like characters, episode, time and space - are more comparable with the novel genre which includes the same elements. In this regard, this study will focus on romantic masnavis, on the basis of ？eyh？’s Hüsrev ü ？？r？n, the main theme of which is a love affair. Despite being invented and progressed in different societies, contexts and having different structural features, this study will include the ideas on the comparable relations between these two genres. The genres, masnavi and novel, converge on in terms of plot, basic and additional texts, and, in this sense, differing narrators. In this context, a comparison in terms of the “narrator” provides the masnavi genre to be rendered within new viewpoints