Marketing stories: Writing with faith and reading in search of spirituality in Elif Shafak’s fiction

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the reception of Elif Shafak’s fiction as it circulates within the global literary marketplace, examining the responses of secular and religious readerships in English and Turkish. Taking Shafak’s 2010 novel, The Forty Rules of Love, and her 2016 work, Three Daughters of Eve, as case studies, and referring to media and reader reviews of these books, and public commentary by the author, it evaluates the readerly relationships with spirituality and faith that Shafak constructs as they are emulated by both the readers in her novels and the readers of her novels. In doing so, it asks what reading methodologies Shafak forges in a marketplace that situates books as both stories and products. In the urgent defence of a cosmopolitan ideal, and amidst transcontinental markets and metropoles, this article argues that Shafak puts faith in the potential for conviviality to be fostered by the process of reading.

KEYWORDS:

• Elif Shafak
• global literary marketplace
• reading
• spirituality
• cosmopolitanism
• Sufism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Turkish translation sold half a million copies in just eight months (Strauss 2010).

2. Speaking of responses to Khaled Hosseini’s (2003) The Kite Runner posted on Amazon, Timothy Aubry (2009, 25–26) describes the site as “a remarkable source” which might “produce a better understanding of the desires, values, and expectations that shape the reception of ‘foreign’ fiction among Americans”. Goodreads, which shows reviews posted from across regions, is a similarly useful source. My sample includes the first 300 ratings in order to consider timely responses to the novel. However, I am only able to read those in English.

Additional information

Funding

This work was completed during and supported by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (ECR-2021-446).

Notes on contributors

Rachel Gregory Fox

Rachel Gregory Fox is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Kent whose research project focuses on migration, the UK’s Hostile Environment, and the ethics of storytelling. She is the author of (Re)Framing Women in Post-Millennial Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran: Remediated Witnessing in Literary, Visual, and Digital Media (2022) and co-editor, with Ahmad Qabaha, of Post-Millennial Palestine: Literature, Memory, Resistance (2021).