THEORETICAL AND TYPOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF FANTASTIC LITERATURE

Abstract

This article develops a theoretical-typological framework for the comparative study of fantastic literature and tests it on two pairs of texts drawn from the English and Uzbek literary traditions: H. G. Wells and Khojiakbar Shaykhov in the domain of science fiction, and J. K. Rowling and Khudoyberdi Tukhtaboyev in the domain of fantasy. None of the four authors are connected by any documented genetic influence, which makes the material well suited for pure typological comparison. The study integrates two theoretical lineages that are rarely combined in a single analytical model: the Western tradition of genre theory (Todorov, Suvin, Tolkien, Le Guin, Barthes, Chatman) and the Russian formal-structural school (Propp, Meletinsky, Bakhtin, Zhirmunsky). Six typological dimensions are examined, genre boundaries, the cognitive-aesthetic mechanism, morphological-archetypal structure, chronotopic organization, narrative verisimilitude, and the function of contact with the other, each illustrated with textual evidence from the four primary sources. The results show that both science fiction and fantasy, as instantiated in the English and Uzbek traditions, share a stable set of universal structural mechanisms, while the specific cultural filling of these mechanisms, Darwinian rationalism and Arthurian-Celtic mythology on the English side, Eastern humanism and the Uzbek fairy-tale/dastan tradition on the Uzbek side — accounts for the observed differences. The article concludes with a discussion of the institutional, translational, and methodological factors that must be taken into account in comparative studies of fantastic literature across unrelated national traditions.