A literature of quiet devastation: mapping the anxieties of modernisation in the fiction of Sabahattin Ali

This article offers a thematic and sociopolitical reappraisal of Sabahattin Ali’s (1907–1948) fiction, tracing how it registers the anxieties of modernisation across social and intimate life. It argues that Ali’s work is structured by a persistent tension between social injustice and fragile interiority, moving from the short stories’ compressed depictions of bureaucracy, inequality, marginalisation, and unstable gendered roles to the novels’ fuller exploration of anxiety, estrangement, and quiet devastation. Through an analysis of his oeuvre, the article positions literature as evidence for how Turkey’s republican modernisation was absorbed, contested, and internalised in everyday experience. It situates Ali’s encounter with Weimar-era German intellectual life within cultural and linguistic disorientation rather than doctrinal influence. Finally, it revises reductive accounts of Ali as a straightforwardly Marxist writer, showing how his fiction refracts poverty, exploitation, and inequality through psychological realism rather than doctrinal exposition.