WOMEN'S IMAGES AND THEIR EDUCATIONAL IMPORTANCE IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK LITERATURE OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Abstract

This article investigates women’s images and their educational importance in twentieth-century English and Uzbek literature through a comparative lens. It asks how literary representations of women operate as informal pedagogies that cultivate ethical judgment, gendered self-understanding, and notions of agency in readers. The study integrates comparative close reading with feminist narratology and reception-oriented analysis, drawing on selected English modernist and postwar texts and Uzbek prose and poetry shaped by modernization and late-Soviet cultural frameworks. The article’s novelty is an integrative typology of women’s images as educational agents: moral witnesses, custodians of memory, laboring subjects, and pedagogical mediators within family and community. Findings show that women’s portrayals do not simply mirror social transformations; they actively educate by distributing narrative authority, organizing symbolic value, and enabling affective identification.