Both the answers provided so far seem unpersuasive to me. To take each in turn:
Matt's answer relies on the following claim: because it's difficult to draw hard and fast lines around the proper objects of literary analysis, it's difficult to rule out any sort of identification question. I disagree with both parts of this claim.
Granted that we can't say in broad terms that nonfiction is out of scope for us. Students of literature do read, for example, Montaigne's essays or Plato's Symposium, and discuss them as imaginative works even though they aren't intended as fiction. But the important qualifier here is discuss them as imaginative works. When we read nonfiction for the purposes of literary analysis, we don't read it for its discursive or expository content. We don't read, say, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy to gain factual information about what we would now call depression. We read it to understand Burton's mind and art, and to place the work within its cultural context.
The same is not true of contemporary sex manuals. Fifty or a hundred years from now a scholar might be moved to analyze, say, Tantric Secrets for Men in the context of studying depictions of oriental traditions in turn-of-the-millennium sexual practice handbooks. But in the present day, absent any such contextual framing, we would not allow questions merely about the content of such a handbook. If someone were to ask, For the position described on page 52 of Tantric Secrets for Men, where should my right foot go?, we'd close it as off-topic. We would not say, "well, Tantric Secrets for Men is a written work, and so a question about something inside the work should be allowed, because where do we draw the line?"
Matt also mentions allowing questions about boy band fan blogs, newspaper articles, etc. But we said we would allow questions about the literary aspects of those works, such as the rhetorical devices used in them; not that we would answer any and every question about them simply because they're written works. If someone posts a few sentences from such a blog and asks about the literary devices therein, that's fine. But we wouldn't say that a question directly about the content of the blog is on-topic: Blog says this band member got married for the first time in 2021, I thought he was briefly married in 2018? is not a question we would entertain.
The above reasoning provides us the clear line Matt claims cannot be drawn. We wouldn't say a question like I read [yadda yadda] on a blog about BTS a couple of years ago, please help me remember which blog it was is on topic as an identification question simply because the blog is a written work. We'd say that question isn't about literature as we're using the term here. Likewise, we shouldn't allow a question asking us to identify a tantric sex manual. It's not about literature as we're using the term here. While we define "literature" broadly, we do not mean it to encompass "any printed work." We specifically mean imaginative literature. Why should we not say, then, that works that do not qualify as imaginative literature are outside our scope for identification requests?
Matt's answer also asks whether by disallowing identification questions about a cookbook, we would disallow an identification question about Lucky Gryphon. The former is not by default a literary work; the latter is clearly a work of the imagination. Likewise, disallowing an identification question about a sex manual does not mean we disallow questions about the Kama Sutra, which we discuss for the same reason we discuss the Symposium or Montaigne's essays. So I belive that argument is a straw man.
Turning now to Skooba's answer, his claim is: an unknown written work might indeed turn out to be a literary work, and so we should allow any identification question. I agree with Skooba's assumption that we can make some distinction between literary and non-literary works. I agree also that generally speaking, we need to be generous rather than exclusionary.
That said, I think that the distinction between literary and non-literary can and does provide boundaries for our scope. I don't believe that because "we have no genre scope," we have to allow any identification question. As I've argued above, even though we don't restrict ourselves to a specific genre, we have scope. Our scope encompasses questions about (1) works of imaginative literature and (2) literary aspects of non-literary works. In practice, we clearly understand that scope. I doubt any regular of this site would claim that the content-based example questions about Tantric Secrets or the boy band blog are, or ought to be, on topic for us. And "we should restrict questions to our scope" is not a controversial or élitist claim.
Where Skooba and I differ most clearly is in what this scope means for identification questions. He thinks we should assume that any identification question is potentially about a literary work. I do not believe it's too high a burden for it to be incumbent upon the asker to make that clear. If the question is about a short story or poem, it's clear already. If the question is about a cookbook or a sex manual, why shouldn't we assume it's off-topic? We tell people who ask identification questions to provide details about where they came across the work. That alone should be sufficient to make it clear whether the work is in scope or not. For works in scope, the asker can and should make specify: "this is a 17th C. cookbook," or "this is a fictional sex manual." If they do not provide that information, we should indeed treat the question as out of scope. I don't think it's ungenerous to say that someone asking a question about a non-literary work should make clear why that question belongs here.
To sum up: We can indeed define imaginative literature: works that we read non-discursively—not for their factual content, but to study and enjoy as products of an individual or cultural imagination. We focus on questions about imaginative literature. Yes, we allow questions about non-literary works. But we recognize and make distinctions between what we might broadly call literary and non-literary questions about those works. A literary question about those works would involve some sort of cultural context or rhetorical analysis. An identification question for a non-literary work is not a question about literature as that word is used on this site, because it is not asking about the literary aspects of that work. Absent evidence from the asker that the question is on-topic, we should close such questions.
