FOLKLORE AND MYTHOLOGICAL IMAGERY IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK ROMANTIC POETRY: A COMPARATIVE-TYPOLOGICAL STUDY

Abstract

This article undertakes a comparative-typological examination of folklore elements and mythological imagery as they operate within two poetic traditions that flourished under the banner of Romanticism: the English school of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the Uzbek poetic revival of the early twentieth century. Rather than treating myth as mere ornament, the study approaches it as a structural principle through which Romantic poets articulated national consciousness, spiritual longing, and resistance to rationalist constraint. Drawing on the verse of William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley on the one hand, and of Abdulhamid Cho'lpon, Abdurauf Fitrat, and Usmon Nosir on the other, the analysis identifies convergent typological features — the remythologisation of the natural world, the heroic archetype, and the symbolic geography of homeland — alongside divergences rooted in distinct religious, folkloric, and historical soils. The findings suggest that mythological imagery in both traditions performs an identity-forming function, and that its comparative study illuminates the universality of Romantic aesthetics without erasing national specificity.