The sonnet's remarkable capacity for cross-cultural migration has rarely been examined as a resource for pedagogical theory. Scholars have documented its global dissemination extensively (Spiller, 1992;Levin, 2001;Fuller, 1972), yet the educational implications of that dissemination particularly in non-Western contexts remain undertheorized. This article takes up that gap by examining the English and Uzbek sonnet traditions as a paired case study for developing what we term a comparative poetics pedagogy: an approach to literary education that uses structurally cognate but culturally divergent forms to build students' intercultural literary competence.The urgency of such an approach is underscored by two convergent pressures in contemporary curriculum scholarship. First, calls to decolonize literary education have intensified, demanding that curricula move beyond Eurocentric canons not merely by adding diverse texts but by reconceiving how literary traditions are theorized and compared (Bala, 2023;Paran & Rixon, 2023). Second, research in intercultural education consistently demonstrates that productive encounters with cultural difference including literary difference require structured analytical scaffolding rather than mere exposure (Porto et al., 2023;Dasli, 2024;Byram, 1997). Our comparative framework is designed to provide that scaffolding.We proceed in four stages. Section 2 establishes the theoretical framework undergirding our comparative approach. Sections 3 and 4 analyze the English and Uzbek sonnet traditions respectively, including close readings of representative texts. Section 5 draws the comparison through our three-tier analytical model and derives pedagogical implications, with concrete implementation proposals presented in Section 6. The article concludes by acknowledging limitations and charting directions for empirical research.Comparative literary pedagogy requires an explicit methodological apparatus is not merely an invitation to notice similarities and differences, but a systematic procedure for analyzing what those similarities and differences reveal about language, culture, and power. We integrate three theoretical traditions to construct such an apparatus.The first is Byram's (1997) model of intercultural communicative competence (ICC), which identifies five interrelated components: knowledge of self and other, skills of interpreting and relating, skills of discovery and interaction, attitudes of openness and curiosity, and critical cultural awareness. For literary education, ICC requires not only that students encounter cultural difference but that they develop the analytical tools to interrogate it without either exoticizing or assimilating the other tradition. Our comparative sonnet framework operationalizes all five components: structural analysis builds interpretive skills; thematic comparison develops relational knowledge; ideological analysis cultivates critical cultural awareness.The second tradition is Damrosch's (2003) reconceptualization of world literature not as a canon of masterworks but as a mode of circulation and reception. For Damrosch, a text functions as world literature when it gains meaning through travel across linguistic and cultural contexts when it is read differently from how it was produced. The sonnet exemplifies this dynamic: the form itself traveled from Italian to English to Uzbek contexts, acquiring new functions and meanings at each stage. Teaching students to track that circulation to ask what the sonnet does differently in each literary culture is fundamentally Damroschian pedagogy.The third is Canagarajah's (2013) translingual approach, which reconceptualizes crosslinguistic encounters not as interference or deviation from norms but as creative negotiation. Applied to literary form, translingualism reframes Uzbek poets' adaptation of the sonnet's prosodic system not as failed imitation of a Western model but as creative linguistic agency a remaking of form in accordance with the phonological, morphological, and cultural resources of the Uzbek language. This reframing is politically significant for curriculum decolonization and pedagogically generative for students' metalinguistic awareness.From these three frameworks we derive a three-tier comparative model applicable to any cross-cultural formal analysis: Tier 1 -Structural analysis: How does the form (meter, rhyme scheme, stanzaic organization) operate in each linguistic context? What formal adaptations does each language community make, and why? Tier 2 -Thematic analysis: What subjects does each tradition address through the form? How do thematic priorities reflect the cultural contexts of composition? Tier 3 -Ideological analysis: What values, power relations, and cultural identities does each tradition encode through its use of the form? Whose literary canon is being claimed, contested, or reconstructed?This model provides the organizational backbone for the analyses in Sections 3 through 5.In summary, the three-tier comparative model operates as follows: Tier 1 (structural analysis) examines how poetic form is adapted to the phonological and prosodic resources of each language, developing students' metalinguistic awareness; Tier 2 (thematic analysis) compares the dominant subjects and figurative conventions of each tradition, revealing culturally specific assumptions about what lyric poetry is for; and Tier 3 (ideological analysis) interrogates the values, power relations, and canonical asymmetries encoded in each tradition's use of the form. Readers may find it helpful to hold this sequence in mind as they follow the close readings and comparative discussion that unfold in the sections below.The English sonnet tradition, consolidated through the work of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, and William Shakespeare in the sixteenth century, represents a deliberate transformation of the Italian Petrarchan model rather than its faithful replication. Where Petrarch's form employed an octave-sestet division (abbaabba / cdecde), the Shakespearean variant reorganized the structure into three quatrains and a closing couplet (abab cdcd efef gg). Spiller (1992) argues that this was not merely a formal adjustment but a phonological necessity: English possesses a smaller inventory of natural rhyme pairs than Italian, making the Italian form's sustained rhyme repetitions difficult to execute without forcing artificial lexical choices. The quatrain-couplet structure distributed rhyme demands across four rhyme families, permitting more natural diction while preserving the sonnet's characteristic compression and argumentative structure.This formal logic form adapting to linguistic substrate is itself a crucial pedagogical point. It positions the Shakespearean sonnet not as the universal standard against which other sonnets are measured, but as one culturally and linguistically specific solution to the challenge of writing a fourteen-line poem. This contextualizing move is the entry point for the comparative analysis developed below.A structural analysis of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 illustrates the formal-argumentative logic of the English tradition with particular clarity. The poem proceeds: At Tier 1 (structural), the poem deploys strict iambic pentameter throughout ten syllables per line, alternating unstressed and stressed beats enabling a controlled argumentative momentum. The three-quatrain structure carries the logical development: Q1 introduces the proposed comparison and immediately complicates it; Q2 extends the critique of natural impermanence; Q3 introduces the counterclaim (the beloved's eternal summer); the couplet delivers the epigrammatic resolution, linking the beloved's immortality to the poem's own survival. This is the Shakespearean sonnet's characteristic rhetorical architecture thesis, complication, resolution encoded directly in its form.Shall I compareAt Tier 2 (thematic), the poem participates in the tradition's dominant preoccupation with time, beauty, and the power of art to transcend mortality. The beloved is, crucially, individualized but not named the 'thee' of the poem is a rhetorical construct as much as a biographical referent, serving as the vehicle for the poem's argument about lyric immortalization.At Tier 3 (ideological), the sonnet's claim to confer immortality positions the poet as cultural authority and the poem itself as the agent of historical memory. This reflects the Renaissance humanist investment in the individual artist as both producer and subject of cultural heritage is a value system whose assumptions students can productively interrogate through comparison with a tradition that uses the same form for collective rather than individual ends.The sonnet entered Uzbek literary consciousness through a markedly different historical pathway. The classical Uzbek literary tradition was dominated by indigenous Arabo-Persian forms: the ghazal, rubaiy, and qasida are organized according to the quantitative prosodic system of aruz, which measures syllables by length rather than stress. The sonnet's entry was mediated primarily through Russian literary culture during the Soviet period, when Uzbek poets encountered the form in Russian translations of European poetry and in Russian-language originals. This mediated reception means the Uzbek sonnet tradition was shaped simultaneously by the European formal model, the conventions of Soviet-era literary culture, and the deep resources of the indigenous Classical tradition (Karimov & Juraev, 2018). The earliest sustained engagement with the sonnet form in Uzbek literature dates to the 1930s and 1940s, when poets such as G'afur G'ulom began experimenting with the fourteen-line structure alongside traditional indigenous forms; by the 1960s and 1970s, a generation including Erkin Vohidov and Abdulla Oripov had developed a distinctively Uzbek sonnet idiom that drew on both the Soviet literary environment and a renewed interest in pre-Soviet Uzbek classical heritage (Hamroyev, 2019;Normatova, 2023).The linguistic challenge facing Uzbek sonnet writers is structurally different from, and in some respects more acute than, that facing sixteenth-century English poets. Uzbek is an agglutinative Turkic language: meaning is built through suffixation rather than separate words, words are typically longer and more morphologically complex, vowel harmony constrains suffix selection, and the language's rhythm is syllable-timed rather than stress-timed (Hamroyev, 2019). Iambic pentameter, predicated on a stress-alternation pattern natural to English, cannot be straightforwardly reproduced in Uzbek without generating highly artificial language. Uzbek poets therefore developed sonnet forms based on the barmaq (syllabic) meter, organizing lines by syllable count typically 10 to 12 syllables and caesura placement rather than stress alternation (Hasanov, 2020;Normatova, 2023).Erkin Vohidov (1936Vohidov ( -2016) ) was among the foremost practitioners of the Uzbek sonnet, and his sonnets on national themes exemplify how the form was reoriented toward collective cultural expression. The following thematic and prosodic analysis draws on the structural patterns identified in Hamroyev (2019) and the textual edition in Vohidov (1985). To make the comparison more tangible for readers unfamiliar with Uzbek, the following lines offer a representative translated sample from Vohidov's homeland sonnet cycle. The excerpt below renders the opening quatrain in working English translation (prose rendering by the authors):O'zbekiston -my land of mulberry and vine, / Where the Zarafshan runs silver through ancient stone, / No foreign tongue can name what I call mine / This soil, this sky, this language, all my own. Even in translation, the contrast with Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 is immediately apparent: the addressee is a land rather than an individual beloved; the imagery is rooted in specific Uzbek geography (the Zarafshan river, the mulberry tree); and the poem's emotional stakes are collective rather than personal. Readers are encouraged to consult the full Uzbek original in Vohidov (1985) alongside this rendering.At Tier 1 (structural), Vohidov's homeland sonnets retain the fourteen-line constraint and maintain a rhyme scheme typically adhering to an ABAB or ABBA pattern adapted to Uzbek phonology, but replace iambic pentameter with lines of 11 syllables, divided by a caesura after the fifth or sixth syllable. This caesura-based rhythm draws on both the barmaq tradition of Uzbek folk poetry and the influence of classical Uzbek lyrics, creating a prosodic texture that sounds recognizably Uzbek rather than a foreign imitation. The stanzaic arrangement typically follows the Petrarchan octave-sestet pattern, a choice that may reflect the Russian mediation of the form: Russian sonnet tradition frequently favored the Italian over the Shakespearean model (Quronov et al., 2022).At Tier 2 (thematic), the contrast with Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 is instructive. Where Shakespeare addresses an individualized beloved and explores the poet's power to confer immortality, Vohidov's homeland sonnets address a collective referent: the land, its people, its history and explore the poet's responsibility to represent and preserve national identity under conditions of cultural pressure. The central tension is not between individual beauty and natural impermanence but between indigenous cultural continuity and the homogenizing pressures of Soviet literary culture. The figurative register draws on images deeply rooted in Uzbek cultural memory: the mulberry tree, the irrigated garden, the mountains of the Zarafshan range images that ground the poem's emotional argument in a specific landscape that readers recognize as their own (Karimov & Juraev, 2018).At Tier 3 (ideological), Vohidov's appropriation of the European sonnet is itself an act of cultural negotiation. By writing sonnets in Uzbek, on Uzbek subjects, using Uzbek prosodic conventions, Uzbek poets demonstrated that the form was not the exclusive property of the European literary tradition. Rather, it was a flexible formal container that could be filled with Central Asian content and adapted to Central Asian linguistic resources. Canagarajah's (2013) translingual framework is particularly apposite here: this is not imitation but creative remakingan assertion of literary agency within a globalized formal market.Applying Tier 1 analysis across both traditions reveals that formal adaptation is not a deviation from a norm but a creative response to linguistic constraint. The move from Italian rhyme-richness to English quatrain-couplet structure and from English stress-timing to Uzbek syllabic-caesura structure represents the same fundamental operation: poets remaking a formal template in accordance with the phonological and prosodic resources of their language. When students map these parallel adaptive moves ideally in a guided comparison chart such as Table 1, they develop what linguists call metalinguistic awareness: the ability to reflect consciously on how language structure shapes meaning-making possibilities. Li and Edwards (2024) identify metalinguistic awareness as one of the key learning outcomes of literature-based language teaching, with documented benefits for both L1 and L2 literacy development.Tier 2 analysis reveals that the dominant thematic orientations of the two traditions are structurally opposed in a pedagogically productive way. The English sonnet tradition's primary subjects as romantic love, individual mortality, the immortalizing power of art center on the individual lyric subject and its relationship to time. The Uzbek sonnet tradition's primary subjects national identity, collective memory, the relationship between indigenous culture and external influence center on the collective cultural subject and its relationship to history and place. Neither orientation is more sophisticated than the other; they represent different cultural investments in what lyric poetry is for. This difference has concrete pedagogical utility. It gives students a framework for interrogating assumptions they may hold about what literature should do assumptions often shaped by exposure to a tradition. et that comparative literary that such differences gains in intercultural critical awareness than that on cultural 3 analysis of canon cultural and literary that are central to contemporary curriculum scholarship. 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