Abstract:
Epic is a literary genre that reflects the common views towards the incidents, beliefs, national conscience, aestethic intellections, aims and morals of a society in which they are created. Accordingly, the aim of this thesis is to detect the folk epic and the type and motives which belongs to the variation of the genre, created in Uighur Turks, which are an important clan of Turks. In this way, in the World of Epics, the meaning that is attributed by uighurs to epic heroes and the motives, in terms of their beliefs, will be revealed. In the study, 18 Uighur epics and along with their variations, 34 texts are embraced comparatively. Thus, with this thesis, Uighur Folk Epics finds an opportunity to be evaluated collectively. In the study, which is focused on the type and motive research, the general characteristics of ideal heroic type and subsidiary heroic type are identified primarily. Afterwards, apart from ideal heoic type which takes part in uighur epic, by means of investigating the "woman type, wise-man type, animal type and antagonist type, which are under the name of the subsidiary heroic type, results are compared. By comparing and contrasting the relationship between Turkish Folk Epic, the characteristics of the types are exhibited. Since it is impossilbe to include all the epic texts into the thesis, the adventures of heroes are presented in detail by giving the episodes. Moreover, through detecting the motives, which are regarded as the main infrastructure of the epic, it is given with the counterparts in the Turkish Epic World. As a result of detections and evaluations; even if Uighur Epic types are seen as a kind of closer to the folk literatüre, content-wise, looking at the characteristics of types and the meanings that motives are representing, as a part of Turkish Epic Worlds, Uighurs have an Epic type which is unique to them.
