TRANSMOTIVATION IN THE NOVELS “KING-ERRANT” AND “RAIDERS FROM NORTH”

Abstract

The life and creative legacy of Zahiriddin Muhammad Babur – king and poet, and founder of a great empire in the sixteenth century across the territories of Movarounnahr, Afghanistan, and India – have been extensively studied not only by Uzbek scholars but also by Indian, English, Japanese, Russian, German, and French researchers. On the basis of his historical-memoir work “Baburnama”, numerous scholarly and literary works have been produced. While artistic novels created in Uzbek literature, such as “Starry nights” and “Baburiy-nama”, have been comprehensively examined by national scholars, works in English literature depicting the life of Babur Mirza have not been sufficiently introduced to the Uzbek readership. Accordingly, the present article aims to analyze the novels “King-errant” and “Raiders from the North”, created in English literature on the basis of Babur’s historical-memoir work “Baburnama”, with particular focus on the phenomenon of transmotivation manifested therein. In the course of the study, the transfer of motifs from “Baburnama” into the structure of these two novels – accompanied by a transformation of their original purpose, namely, the alteration of the primary cause of specific events in the new literary context – has been examined through illustrative examples. Within this framework, the processes of demotivation and remotivation, as well as their functions and significance in the creation of historical-fictional novels, have been identified and elucidated. The findings of the research demonstrate that several instances of transmotivation undergoing similar transformations in both novels have been determined and comparatively analyzed. The theoretical foundation of the study is grounded in Gérard Genette’s work “Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree”. Furthermore, relying on the data presented in “Baburnama,” the source bases of the novels “King-errant” and “Raiders from the North” have been established. The present research may serve as a theoretical resource for the fields of literary and Baburi studies.