JADID THOUGHT AND ISSUES OF NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE TRAVELOGUE GENRE

Abstract

This article examines the development of the travelogue genre in Jadid journalism in the early twentieth century and its role in expressing the ideas of national awakening. The study aims to identify the generic and journalistic characteristics of Jadid travel writings and reveal the principles through which they addressed enlightenment, social reform, and national development. Historical-comparative, genre-typological, and contextual methods of analysis were employed. The study focuses on Mahmudkhodja Behbudi’s Travel Memoirs, Nushiravan Yavushev’s Travel Fragments, and Abdulla Avloni’s A Journey through My Own City and Afghan Journey. Its subject encompasses the journalistic nature of travel impressions, spatial descriptions, comparative observations, social criticism, authorial assessments, and educational conclusions presented in these works. The analysis demonstrates that spatial representation in Jadid travel writing became a means of assessing the nation’s education, press, economic activity, and political condition. It also establishes that the travelogue served the Jadids as an effective journalistic instrument for studying the experiences of other nations, critically interpreting the realities of Turkestan, and mobilising the public toward reform. The study concludes that the integration of facts, impressions, comparative analysis, authorial perspective, and socially significant conclusions laid an important foundation for the emergence and subsequent development of the Uzbek travel essay.