LINGUISTIC EXPRESSION OF THE UNSEEN WORLD IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK LITERATURE: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Abstrak

Every culture has its own way of speaking about what cannot be seen — the spirits, the divine, the mysterious forces that shape human life from beyond the visible world. This article explores how English and Uzbek literary traditions have used language to give voice to that invisible realm, comparing the words, images, and storytelling methods each tradition has developed over centuries. Rather than treating these two literatures as distant or unrelated, this study looks for the deeper human threads that connect them, while also paying close attention to the cultural and religious differences that make each tradition uniquely its own. Drawing on texts from classical and modern periods in both traditions — from the mystical ghazals of Alisher Navoi and the shamanistic echoes of the Alpomish epic to the Gothic fiction of the English Romantics and the supernatural imagery of Shakespeare — the article argues that literature’s engagement with the unseen is not merely decorative or fantastical. It is, rather, one of the most fundamental things language does: reach toward what words alone can never fully capture