Journal of Historical Studies, 5 (2007), 69-82. CONSTRUCTING DIVISIONS BETWEEN CITY AND COUNTRYSIDE:ON FERTILE LANDS AND DISTANT

One of the most fallacious habits and depravations that we are inclined to is our dislike of the other, necessary and unnecessary slandering of each other. The contempt of Istanbulites and countrymen who are the children of the same country and thus the contempt of the urban dwellers and the peasants toward each other constitutes one of the most important national catastrophes.1 Urban life has been one of the main subjects of interest in literary genres since the nineteenth century. Parallel to the industrialization process, together with the rural-urban migration and urbanization accompanying it, novelists and poets began to write about the urban experience while philosophers and social scientists began to contemplate and search for the unanticipated consequences of urbanization and its effects on everyday life. Gustave Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale, almost all o