The novel was accepted as agenre in its own right after going through several stages. In the West, writers who wanted to distinguish the novel from romances and picaresques tried to emphasize that the novel told the "truth" and tried to define the novel's boundaries with "fantastic" products. The fantastic has existed in literature since fairy tales, but the assumption that the fairy tale is only a product of imagination distinguishes it from fantastic fiction. In the beginning, realist novels overtook romantic language, followed bynaturalist novels. However, as modernism and postmodernism influenced the novel's language, it became more flexible and could no longer stand up to the "imaginary," that is, the fantastic. The Tanzimat novelists, who sought to tell the "truth" in Turkish literature as well as in the West, opposed fantasy. However, the susceptibility of traditional language to fantasy did not prevent writers from benefiting from it. As a result, the fantastic novel, a genre that had been delayed in Turkish literature, continued in silence. The first examples of this genre were written by Ahmet Mithat Efendi, Giritli Aziz Efendi, and H & uuml;seyin Rahmi G & uuml;rpnar. Babil Melikesi, written at the beginning of the 19th century, is also a remarkable novel in terms of its fantastical features and is significant for being one of the first fantasy novels. The fantastic elements in Babil Melikesi, by Selami & Idot;zzet Sedes, will be examined in this study, as will the place of the fantastic novel in Turkish literature.
