Limits of the Imaginable in the Early Turkish Novel: Non-Muslim Prostitutes and Their Ottoman Muslim Clients

In the first Ottoman Turkish novels written during the late nineteenth century, the development of romance between a man and a woman was restricted by certain rules that migrated into fiction from the social sphere. Since unrelated Muslim women and men were hindered from cultivating a romance by various social rules, the problem of representing romance was solved by bringing together an Ottoman Muslim man and a non-Muslim Ottoman woman from the ethnic and religious minority groups in the Ottoman Empire, such as women from Greek, Armenian, or Jewish minorities or from European communities. [...]the space of the novel becomes a forum for the ethnic and religious anxieties of the time.