Folklore Traditions in 17th–18th Century Uzbek Literature: Continuities, Adaptations, and Early-Modern Transformations

Abstract

This review article examines how Uzbek literary culture of the 17th and 18th centuries incorporated, reframed, and stylized folklore traditions across genres and media (oral performance, manuscript culture, and courtly-written forms). Rather than treating “folklore” and “written literature” as separate domains, the article argues that early-modern Uzbek literature developed through constant traffic between oral narrative-poetic repertoires (doston/epic cycles, ritual narratives, proverbs, and lyrical song forms) and the prestige conventions of Chagatai-Turkic poetics. Synthesizing recent scholarship on folklorism as a philological category, on epic performance traditions and their historical frames, and on vernacularizing tendencies within post-classical Chagatai textuality, the article proposes a model of selective folklorization: writers and compilers embedded folkloric motifs, formulas, and ritual plots into written texts to achieve legibility for broader audiences, to intensify ethical address, and to negotiate social authority in khanate-era cultural settings. The review concludes by identifying methodological priorities for future research: performance-centered textual criticism, manuscript ecology, and comparative motif analysis across Turkic and Persianate narrative spaces.