This paper examines how the “modern” urban Turkish women are represented in Turkishfiction between 1960 and 1980, particularly in three novels written by three different femaleauthors, with a focus on the intersectionality of national identity, gender, the self-actualizationof women, and the experience of modernity.

The three novels are Nezihe Meriç`s The PirateDead End Street (1961), Leyla Erbil`s A Strange Woman (1971), and Adalet Agaoğlu’s LyingDown to Die (1973) that bring the female characters into the center stage of the narratives inrelation to Turkish modernity.

In this manner, this study aims at exploring the ways and modesin which the female protagonists in the novels problematize the restricted meaning and featuresof the “modern” Turkish female identity with regard to the Turkey`s radical modernizationproject from the 1920s onwards.

By focusing on the relationship between the representationsof the Turkish femininities and the narrative techniques in the novels through close reading andthe toolbox of the feminist narratology, this study first investigates the interplay between theself-actualization of female characters in the gender-specific context of Turkish modernity andthe plot structure of each novel that inhabits a story of urban female protagonist, associating itwith nationalist Republican modernity process.

Secondly, the paper therefore scrutinizes thetextual strategies and the idea of tragic used to challenge the singularity of the modern femaleidentity, focusing more on character`s discourses, narrative voice, perspective, the feministvoice in each novel. By doing so, this paper examines these novels in relation to the moderncondition in Turkey as they generate a feminist discourse and experimental storytelling featuresin the Turkish novel at that time.

The feminist discourse with innovative narrative aspectsprovides feminist poetics in the Turkish novel emerged beginning from the early1960s, offeringnew ways of representing the Turkish femininities in fiction.