Özet:

Traditional literary criticism has defined epistle as a genre used for improvement of fiction in a narrative for a long time, in European literature. However, in the 1970s academic studies, benefiting from postmodern and feminist critical approaches, began to redefine epistolary novels that were written during the eighteenth century as a sub-genre because these texts play a conciliatory role between dichotomies such as selfother and public-private. In Turkish literature, the epistle genre has a long-established past, which passed many transformations from Ottoman literature to modern literature. In this study, functions of epistolary form was searched through short stories, written during the Tanzimat period. In the first part, academic studies in the light of postmodern and feminist critical approaches, focusing on epistolary novels in European literature were discussed. In the second part, various short stories, written during the Tanzimat period, were analyzed according to these critical approaches. They were suggested as proto-feminist texts because of discussing concepts such as love, marriage in the light of the woman question. Therefore, it was claimed that these texts may be considered as alternative historical narratives. Lastly, the stylistic function of this genre to these texts was questioned in the article

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