The fundamental purpose of this dissertation is to offer new perspectives on Turkish literary and social culture by focusing on the representations of women in the novels written by women authors. Literature as an art of representation allows us to see how language serves women's voices in creating alternate realities and resistance to the avenues of power open to them in the world. The status of women and men as being both biologically and sociologically different from one another requires them to have different perspectives on literary creativity. However, women struggle with identity, with becoming individuals, in literature just as they do in society. Women's exclusion from the field of language, their imprisonment in silence and relegation to certain roles, and their collective reduction to nothing more than a body are not coincidental. As such, this dissertation discusses the opportunities created by literature to construct, exhibit, and revise women's bodies, voices, and roles by means of writers, narrators and characters. It also examines the textual features of literary works (i.e., novels) written by female Turkish authors in the 21st century.