‘The Other’ at the border: literary sieges and identity construction

In the 20th century, the issue of creating a national identity and fashioning the self gained significant importance as a consequence of the increasing nationalist movements and establishment of the unitary states with the collapse of empires. To create a collective identity consciousness in society, literature was utilized as one of the mediums, as it can be used in the service of different ideologies. First published in 1899, Eclipse of the Crescent Moon (Egri Csillagok) by Géza Gárdonyi focuses on creating the Hungarian national identity through the Turks, whereas The Siege (Kështjella) by Ismail Kadare, first published in 1970, represents the siege of an unknown Albanian citadel by the Ottomans. The Orient – the Turks are the mutual enemy in both novels. In this work, both novels will be studied with their relations to the history and the era, and the political conditions they were written. Frontier Orientalism by Andre Gingrich and Selffashioning by Stephen Greenblatt will be the main theories to study both literary works.