This article offers a comparative interpretation of the concept of postmodernism as it manifests in Uzbek and English prose. While postmodernism has been theorized as a rupture with grand narratives and a turn toward self-reflexive textuality, its meanings and operative features differ across literary systems. By situating Uzbek post-Soviet prose within the dynamics of cultural transition and English late-twentieth-century fiction within debates over historiography, identity, and market modernity, the study clarifies how a shared conceptual vocabulary—fragmentation, intertextuality, metafiction, and simulacra—acquires localized functions. Methodologically, the article employs a qualitative, hermeneutic-comparative approach that reads a small, representative corpus: English novels associated with postmodern aesthetics and Uzbek prose written in the decades around and after independence. The analysis articulates a comparative interpretive grid that emphasizes four axes—historicity, subjectivity, textuality, and style cohesion—through which postmodernism operates differently yet recognizably in each tradition. The results show that English postmodernism often interrogates history as narrative and the subject as performative construct, while Uzbek postmodernism tends to refract collective memory and cultural continuity amid ideological realignment, transforming postmodern tools into vehicles for ethical remembrance and aesthetic renewal. The article concludes by proposing “situated postmodernism” as a flexible framework that respects both convergences and divergences, and by outlining implications for translation studies and pedagogy.

Postmodernism, Uzbek literature, English literature

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