EDITORIAL FOREWORD

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How do history and literature create a sense of ethnic or imperial community? And how do social and legal normative and disruptive narratives contribute to drawing the boundaries of such communities? To provide some answers, this issue brings together three articles on “Historicizing Fiction” and two on “Early Safavids and Ottomans.” In the first section, David Selim Sayers's article, “Sociosexual Roles in Ottoman Pulp Fiction,” analyzes “premodern sociosexual roles” in the Ottoman Empire through the Tıfli stories, a form of lowbrow literature that narrates the everyday lives of their protagonists in Ottoman Istanbul. This genre seems to have appeared initially in the 18th century, but it peaked in the early 19th century amidst the expansion of Ottoman commercial printing. As Sayers points out, the early 19th century was also a period that witnessed a major transformation of the sociosexual order of the Middle East, perhaps explaining why the authors of the Tıfli stories reflected on the prior order in their writing. Sayers argues that whereas most sources on this subject are prescriptive and transgressive, seeking to “outline, defend, or undermine sociosexual norms,” the Tıfli stories “portray the conflict that ensues when these norms are compromised in suspenseful yet relatable ways.” Through his analysis of these stories, Sayers blurs the lines between roles such as the boy-beloved, the female adolescent, and the adult male and female pursuer, which in other sources and analyses appear self-contained. Yet he also makes an effort “to advance beyond a definition of the roles towards an understanding of how they were negotiated by subjects of history.”