The age of late neoliberal modernity has prompted new discussions on World Literature and translation, which-but for a handful of classic exceptions-inadvertently tend to exclude literary texts written before 1945 in the Global South, colonial settings, and settings beyond Western/Central Europe and North America. I conclude the article by demonstrating the urgent importance of recognizing the multifarious political aspects of Madonna in order to reevaluate the novel's current bestseller status in Turkey, and the specific marketing strategies adopted for its English publication with Penguin Classics in 2016. In particular, I show how the layered intertextualities between Madonna and Venus relate to Ali's political and judicial struggles at the time of Ma-donna's publication. In this article, I argue that Ali intentionally deployed intertextuality in order to take a political stand and critique his contemporary context. At a time period when Turkey's ruling government did not shy away from occasionally cooperating with the Nazi regime and allowing Nazi infiltration, Ali's references to a German-language novel carry political repercussions. In his final novel Kürk Mantolu Madonna (1943, The Madonna in the Fur Coat), social-realist author Sabahattin Ali deployed multiple intertextualities with Leopold Sacher-Masoch's novel Venus im Pelz (1870, Venus in Furs).
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