Pierre Loti’s Fascination of Turkey in Novels and Travel Books with Comparative Analysis of Cultural and Expressive Level Between France and Turkey with Particular Mention of Exotic Elements

Abstract

From the novel Aziyadé to the travel book Suprêmes visions d’Orient, Loti’s first to his last volume, and trough novels and travel books, Fantôme d’Orient, Constantinople en 1890, Les Désenchantées, Turquie agonisante and many written pages of Loti’s work, Turkey, and above all Istanbul, remain present and loved, not only in his work, but also in his life. Thousands of pages, in which change of enthusiasm, nostalgia and objectivity, tell the story of love at first sight between the naval officer and Turkey, the love that will last through his life, which will be extinguished in 1923, the same year when the writer died, and the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist. Discovering Turkey, during his nine journeys and trips, some of which lasted only a few days, and some a few months, Loti discovers a country whose culture, customs, inhabitants, religion, language, the beauty of women and a lot of it, according to his opinion do not leave anyone indifferent. The concept of exoticism, which permeates the work of Pierre Loti, is such that exoticism is not a décor in which the action of thousands of written pages takes place, but it also permeates the thematic and the action and the narration and the vocabulary and the description of human relations as well as the psychology of the personality, according to which exoticism is neither a topic, nor content, but an experience, what makes the past and the future can become something that is exotic. Today, when the concepts of mundialization and multiculturalism have become important, the work of Pierre Loti, mostly based on travel documents describing the world that he discovered and presented to readers of another culture, gets a completely new dimension and opens up new possibilities for his interpretations, whereby we must not forget that for Loti, "enter, actually means get out"

Keywords

• Journey,Historical Facts,Cultural Levels,Customs,Influence

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