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Indomitable. Matti Kurikka's dreams and failures on three continents
Matti Kurikka (1863–1915) is a multi-dimensional and controversial character in Finnish history. He was a playwright, a journalist, a socialist, and a theosophist, as well as a speaker for sexual emancipation and women's rights. Kurikka was born in Ingria, and his activities spanned not only Finland, but also Australia and North America, in both of which he led utopian communities. This biographical study explores Kurikka as a literary and political figure and a builder of utopias, whose life opens fascinating views on the societal and cultural currents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book critically re-evaluates earlier research on Kurikka and highlights forgotten phases of his life by using new source materials found in three continents. The sources include digitized newspapers and periodicals, Kurikka's plays and non-fictional books, oral history, and political cartoons.
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Kalle Päätalo through the eyes of researchers
The Finnish novelist Kaarlo (Kalle) Alvar Päätalo’s (1919–2000) main work, the Iijoki series, consists of 26 novels (comprising ca. 17 000 pages) and was written in 1971–1998. In this book the text corpus in Kielipankki concerning Päätalo’s works is introduced to the readers, as well as the possibilities of digital text mining.
This book includes scientific articles concerning the works of Kalle Päätalo. It also gives ideas for the research that can be carried out in the future. The authors of this book are researchers in the fields of history, linguistics and literature, respectively. The research results presented in this book speak for the fact that the Iijoki series is a significant source material for future research, for example from the point of view of oral history, language variation, metalanguage, swearing and the reader’s reception. The possibilities for future research seem to be quite plentiful.
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Linguistic encounters in the history of Turku. Perspectives on multilingualism
The present volume is a multidisciplinary collection of research articles exploring language use, language contact and multilingualism in the history of Turku, the first town in Finland, founded around the turn of the fourteenth century. Consisting of an introduction by the editors and nine case studies in the fields of linguistics, history, archeology, and literary and cultural studies, the volume participates in a wider discussion on multilingual communities while offering a closer look into linguistic encounters in Turku and its immediate vicinity. The volume covers the period from the Middle Ages (c. 1100–1500) to the latter half of the twentieth century. The case studies illustrate the wide array of languages, linguistic varieties and registers that the inhabitants and travellers used in their daily lives, the specific contexts in which certain languages were used, and the effects of these linguistic encounters at personal, social or institutional levels.
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Language and interaction in human-animal communities
This collection of articles sheds light on the role of human language in interspecies interaction. The book shows that language is not necessarily what separates us from other creatures. It can also be seen as yet another dimension of human existence that is deeply rooted in our shared history and everyday life with other living beings. This volume contains six individual research articles, two short reviews, an opening introduction to the themes of the book, and an extensive, theoretical closing chapter. The studies draw on methodologies and theoretical approaches including conversation analysis and a cognitive, usage-based approach to grammatical constructions. The book further explores the interfaces of linguistics, biosemiotics, and posthumanism. The studies show how linguistic and interactional approaches can contribute to our understanding of how human and non-human animals communicate with each other during embodied activities, how human language users make sense of interspecies encounters in speaking to or about animals, and how human language is thereby impregnated by the presence of other species. The individual research articles study, e.g., interaction with co-present animals, dialectal cow calls, parliamentary speeches, narratives of nature observation, and historical laws.
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Versification describes the marriage of language and poetic form through which poetry is produced. Formal principles, such as metre, alliteration, rhyme, or parallelism, take precedence over syntax and prosody, resulting in expressions becoming organised as verse rather than prose. The aesthetic appeal of poetry is often linked to the potential for this process to seem mysterious or almost magical, not to mention the interplay of particular expressions with forms and expectations. The dynamics of versification thus draw a general interest for everyone, from enthusiasts of poetry or forms of verbal art to researchers of folklore, ethnomusicology, linguistics, literature, philology, and more. The authors of the works in the present volume explore versification from a variety of angles and in diverse cultural milieus. The focus is on metrics in practice, meaning that the authors concentrate not so much on the analysis of the metrical systems per se as on the ways that metres are used and varied in performance by individual poets and in relationship to language.
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Narrative After Postmodernism takes a critical and practical look at the cultural theories of what comes after postmodernism or the postmodern. Alongside contemporary literary authors, the anthology studies diverse contemporary textual phenomena from TV shows to online fan theories and survivalist blogs. The essays compiled in this anthology tentatively apply the theories of the post-postmodern to contemporary texts to see how they might open up for analysis within their new theoretical frameworks or challenge them.
The introduction, co-written by all the authors of this volume, introduces the most influential theories of post-postmodernism and contextualizes them within broader intellectual trends of the early 21st Century. The three essays comprising the first part of the volume discuss some of the theories of the postmodern in relation to contemporary works that seem to challenge them. Yet they also strive to clarify and sharpen some of the ideas proposed in the theories of the post-postmodern.
The second part of the volume aims to show that it is not only the contemporary texts that move beyond the postmodern – the ways of reading literature and interpreting artworks in different media are also changing. The essays in the second part of the volume inquire about the effects of the contemporary literary culture on the methods of interpretation and ways of reading.
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Ingrians, Setos and Votes: historical culture, religious traditions and language
The book focuses on intangible and tangible heritage, language and vernacular religion of the Ingrians, Setos and Votes, three Finnic ethnic minorities sharing a long-standing identification with the Russian Orthodox faith. Written by 16 authors, the chapters are mainly based on nineteenth- and twentieth-century materials. The research history and collecting of folklore are also discussed.
The historical area of the Ingrians and Votes is located in Ingria, adjacent to St. Petersburg, while the Setos have inhabited both sides of the border of southern Estonia and Russia. All three groups live on the borderline of the Eastern and Western Churches and cultural realms.
Currently, the Ingrian and Votic languages are extremely endangered, while the Seto language has approximately 12,000 speakers. There is a high local interest in the maintenance and revitalisation of all three languages and cultural traditions.
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The theme and title of the 100th Yearbook of the Kalevala Society is ”Paradigm”. Paradigm is a framework of prevalent principles, beliefs, values, and norms, and incorporates ideas about what is correct in terms of theory and methodology. Accordingly, paradigm always leads to struggles of authority in relation to other trends and ways of thinking. This book grapples with the historical, contemporary, and ever-shifting paradigms and methods of cultural research. What was being researched in the early 20th century and how was the research conducted? What happened in the 1960s–1980s in this field of research? What methods do our peers use? What kinds of affiliations and antagonisms emerge with the changing paradigms? And how do the different ’turns’ direct research?
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The topic of the book is the incremental growth of linguistic knowledge from lexical to structural-cum-textual during the so-called later language development. Language mastery does not presuppose any acquaintance with prescriptive grammar but, instead, concerns the core of language which the so-called consensus principle applies to: the most frequent words and structures are mastered with certainty by everybody, but uncertainty increases as less frequent and more variable phenomena are taken into consideration. It is the goal of the study to make explicit the knowledge that is common to school children of different age groups, and to show how it develops both in its core and in its fringe areas. The mastery of less common aspects exhibits considerable statistical variation. The research embodies methodological pluralism insofar as it has been carried out by means both of the corpus method and the experimental method. Here experimental subsumes writing tasks, paper-and-pencil tests, and behavior under experimental conditions. The amount of participants native in Finnish varies from 300–2000. The book has a bipartite structure: mastery of meanings (Part I), and mastery of forms (Part II).
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Discursive study of religion (DSR) has become an increasingly recognised and applied approach to the study of religion. It asks: What passes for ‘religion’ in society? How do different constructions of ‘religion’ affect other social spheres such as politics, law, and everyday life, and vice versa? In this collection, Finnish scholars—many of them internationally recognized authorities on the subject—discuss DSR’s theoretical underpinnings, map the variety of discursive approaches, and apply the approach to case studies of politics, spirituality, and history. The book can be used as a textbook for religion and method courses in various disciplines.
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