Poetry in the Uzbek Children’s Literature

Abstract

Children's literature is body of oral and written works that aim to convey ethical and aesthetic values to children and develop children's emotional intelligence, imagination and language skills. Uzbek literature, which is one of the important centers of the Turkic language, culture and literature in the Turkestan area, has a rich children's literature corpus. Uzbek children's literature began to take shape with Uzbek textbooks written at the beginning of the 20th century, and emerged as an independent literature in the 1930's. Although Uzbek children's literature is the subject of various types of studies, it is an area that is generally neglected. This study aims to examine the development of the Uzbek children's literature from 1930 to the present, and to raise awareness of Uzbek children's literature. Translations from world children's literatures into Uzbek were excluded from the scope of the study. The study material is restricted to the common genre of children's literature, poetry. The research focuses on the following questions: What political/social events and factors influenced the Uzbek children's literature? What are the periods and who are the representatives of the Uzbek children's literature? What are types of themes in the Uzbek children's poetry? Uzbek children's literature has been examined in three sections in this study, 1930-1960, 1960-1990 and 1990-present. The study analyzes the political and social background of each period and their reflections in poetry in terms of themes, and includes examples of poems bearing the characteristics of the period with their Turkish translations.