Typological Parallels in Uzbek and English Literary Studies

The article compares how literary scholarship took shape in Uzbek and English letters and argues that the two traditions passed through similar stages despite having no direct contact before the twentieth century. Using the comparative-historical and typological method of V. M. Zhirmunsky, the study sets side by side four groups of texts: pre-modern treatises on prosody and poetics, collections of critical biographies of poets, early twentieth-century writings that tied literary study to national identity, and modern university textbooks of literary theory. The comparison shows three convergences. Alisher Navoi's Majolis un-nafois (1491) and Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets (1779–1781) use the same biographical-evaluative form. Fitrat's Adabiyot qoidalari (1926) and the founding of English studies at Oxford (1894) and Cambridge (1917) both turned criticism into an academic discipline at a moment of national self-definition.