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This study examines experienced space in Maarit Verronen’s works of prose fiction. The study aligns itself with the contemporary approach often referred to as spatial literary studies, a movement connected to the spatial turn within the humanities. Theoretically, the study draws on multiple fields of spatial studies, from semiotics of space to critical theory and poststructuralism. By providing a categorization on different approaches within spatial literary studies, the study promotes literary studies that utilize spatial theory and explores how spatial concepts can be effectively used as tools for close reading.
Since the study aims to provide a longitudinal section of Verronen’s oeuvre, the selected material spans the author’s early works, from the 1990s to the late 2000s. The corpus involves six novels and two short stories. The analysis begins with the fantastic realms of Verronen’s early career, proceeds to consider wilderness and wild spaces, turns to visions of dystopic futures, and concludes in the narratives of homecoming and homesteading. The study shows that Verronen’s fantasy draws its allegorical potential from the juxtaposition of spatialized binary semantic oppositions. By analyzing Verronen’s dystopian novels, the study unravels the spatial nature of the genre and the critical potential it encompasses. Verronen’s narratives on wilderness are approached through the notion of spatial practices and in the context of alienation and postpastoralism. Finally, the analysis on the literary homes and the acts of homesteading in Verronen’s novels foregrounds the open, connected, and inclusive nature of the contemporary notion of home and new forms of attachment to place, both of which are under an active debate in spatial literary studies.
By bringing together spatial literary studies and Verronen’s works, this research adds to the study of Finnish literature and contemporary literature’s emphasis on space, spatiality, and environmental issues. Moreover, the study contributes to the knowledge on the genres of fantasy and dystopia, as well as to the study of classic literary tropes and their contemporary manifestations. As the study contextualizes Verronen’s works within Nordic and European literatures, it draws attention to the thematic and stylistic connections that link her writing to broader literary trends and traditions.
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Arctic Hysteria and Other Strange Northern Emotions: Case Studies in Finnish Literature opens a new perspective on the thriving area of research on the imagined North by studying emotions in the light of case studies in Finnish literature. The volume addresses the cultural history of Arctic hysteria and maps other strange emotions depicted and evoked in literature of the Finnish North. The volume comprises seven case studies which range from the works of internationally renowned authors, such as Rosa Liksom, Emmi Itäranta and Tove Jansson, to the affectively controversial and provocative writings of Timo K. Mukka, Marko Tapio and Pentti Linkola. Drawing from the study of the imagined North and theories and tools in the study of literature and emotions, the analyses show how such moods as melancholia, ecstasy or a peculiar sense of November are generated in texts and how literary emotions entangle with the Northern environment they depict. By focusing on the imagined North in Finnish modernism and contemporary literature, the authors offer original views on experiences of late modernity merging with the changing Northern environment in the age of the Anthropocene.
Book DetailsGenetic criticism investigates creative processes by analysing manuscripts and other archival sources. It sheds light on authors’ working practices and the ways works are developed on the writer’s desk or in the artist’s studio.
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This study offers a new perspective on unusual and unsettling experiences that are often interpreted as “mental illnesses” and on the techniques through which literary representations invite readerly responses and engagement. The book examines how four Finnish modernist writers, Helvi Hämäläinen, Jorma Korpela, Timo K. Mukka, and Maria Vaara, construct experiences of shattering and distress as bodily experiences that are embedded in the social and material world and entangled with social and cultural norms that govern subjectivity, gender, and sexuality. Drawing on narrative theory, theories of embodied cognition, phenomenology of illness, and feminist theory, the analyses show how literary works can invite readers to respond emotionally and to reflect on our views of the human mind and its interaction with the world. The book sheds light on the fictional portrayals and techniques of representation and on the ethics of narrating and reading about painful experiences. It also illuminates the ways the mind, body, consciousness, and mental distress are discussed in Finnish modernist literature and situates the texts in the international modernist tradition.
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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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Migrants and Literature in Finland and Sweden presents new comparative perspectives on transnational literary studies. This collection provides a contribution to the production of new narratives of the nation. The focus of the contributions is contemporary fiction relating to experiences of migration. The volume discusses multicultural writing, emerging modes of writing and generic innovations.
When people are in motion, it changes nations, cultures and peoples. The volume explores the ways in which transcultural connections have affected the national self-understanding in the Swedish and Finnish context. It also presents comparative aspects on the reception of literary works and explores the intersectional perspectives of identities including class, gender, ethnicity, ‘race’ and disability. Further, it also demonstrates the complexity of grouping literatures according to nation and ethnicity.
The case-studies are divided into three chapters: II ‘Generational Shifts’, III ‘Reception and Multicultural Perspectives’ and IV ‘Writing Migrant Identities’. The migration of Finnish labourers to Sweden is reflected in Satu Gröndahl’s and Kukku Melkas’s contributions to this volume, the latter also discusses material related to the placing of Finnish war children (‘krigsbarn’) in Sweden during World War II. Migration between Russia and Finland is discussed by Marja Sorvari, while Johanna Domokos attempts at mapping the Finnish literary field and offering a model for literary analysis. Transformations of the Finnish literary field are also the focus of Hanna-Leena Nissilä’s article discussing the reception of novels by a selection of women authors with an im/migrant background. The African diaspora and the arrival of refugees to Europe from African countries due to wars and political conflicts in the 1970s is the backdrop of Anne Heith’s analysis of migration and literature, while Pirjo Ahokas deals with literature related to the experiences of a Korean adoptee in Sweden. Migration from Africa to Sweden also forms the setting of Eila Rantonen’s article about a novel by a successful, Swedish author with roots in Tunisia. Exile, gender and disability are central, intertwined themes of Marta Ronne’s article, which discusses the work of a Swedish-Latvian author who arrived in Sweden in connection to World War II.
This collection is of particular interest to students and scholars in literary and Nordic studies as well as transnational and migration studies.
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This study examines the narrative tools, techniques, and structures that Marja-Liisa Vartio, a classic of Finnish post-war modernism, used in presenting fictional minds in her narrative prose. The study contributes to the academic discussion on formal and thematic conventions of modernism by addressing the ways in which fictional minds work in interaction, and in relation to the enfolding fictional world. The epistemic problem of how accurately the world, the self, and the other can be known is approached by analyzing two co-operating ways of portraying fictional minds, both from external and internal perspectives. The external perspective relies on detachment and emotional restraint dominating in Vartio’s early novels Se on sitten kevät and Mies kuin mies, tyttö kuin tyttö. The internal perspective pertains to the mental processes of self-reflection, speculation, and excessive imagining that gain more importance in her later novels Kaikki naiset näkevät unia, Tunteet, and Hänen olivat linnut.
In the theoretical chapter of this study, fictional minds are discussed in the context of the acclaimed “inward turn” of modernist fiction, by suggesting alternative methods for reading modernist minds as embodied, emotional, and social entities. In respect to fictional minds’ interaction, this study elaborates on the ideas of “mind-reading,” “intersubjectivity,” and the “social mind” established within post-classical cognitive narratology. Furthermore, it employs possible world poetics when addressing the complexity, incompleteness, and (in)accessibility of Vartio’s epistemic worlds, including the characters’ private worlds of knowledge, beliefs, emotions, hallucinations, and dreams. In regards to the emotional emplotment of fictional worlds, this study also benefits from affective narratology as well as the plot theory being influenced by possible world semantics, narrative dynamics, and cognitive narratology.
As the five analysis chapters of this study show, fictional minds in Vartio’s fiction are not only introspective, solipsist, and streaming, but also embodied and social entities. In the readings of the primary texts, the concept of embodiedness is used to examine the situated presence of an experiencing mind within the time and space of the storyworld. Fictional minds’ (inter)actions are also demonstrated as evolving from local experientiality to long-term calculations that turn emotional incidents into episodes, and episodes into stories. In Vartio’s novels, the emotional story structure of certain conventional story patterns, such as the narratives of female development and the romance plot, the sentimental novel, and epistolary fiction, are modified and causally altered in the portrayal of the embodied interactions between the self, the other, and the world. The trajectories of female self-discovery in Vartio’s novels are analyzed through the emotional responses of characters: their experiences of randomness, their ways of counterfactualizing their traumatic past, their procrastinatory or akratic reactions or indecisiveness. The gradual move away from the percepts of the external world to the excessive imaginings and (mis)readings of other minds (triggered by the interaction of worlds and minds), challenges the contemporary and more recent accounts of modernism both in Finnish and international contexts.
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Finland-Swedish writer Monika Fagerholm is one of the most important contemporary Nordic authors. Her experimental, puzzling and daring novels, such as Underbara kvinnor vid vatten (1994) and Den amerikanska flickan (2004), have attracted much critical attention. She has won several literary awards, including the Nordic prize from the Swedish Academy in 2016; her works have travelled across national and cultural borders as they have now been translated in USA, Europe, Eastern Europe and Russia. Fagerholm’s wild and visionary depictions of girlhood have long had an impact on the Nordic literary landscape; currently, she has many literary followers among young female writers and readers in Finland and Sweden. Novel Districts. Critical Readings of Monika Fagerholm is the first major study of Fagerholm’s works. In this edited volume, literary scholars explore the central themes and features that permeate Fagerholm’s works and introduce novel ways to understand and interpret her writings. The book begins with an introduction to her life, letters and the minority literature context of her writing and briefly describes the scholarship on Fagerholm’s works. After that, Finnish and Swedish scholars and experts on Fagerholm scrutinize her oeuvre in the light of up-to-date literary theory. The insights, theories and concepts of gender, feminist and girlhood studies as well as narratology, poststructuralism, posthumanism and reception studies are tested in close readings of Fagerholm’s works published between 1990 and 2012. Thus, the volume enhances and deepens the understanding of Fagerholm’s fiction and invites the attention of readers not yet familiar with her work. The articles demonstrate the multitude of ways in which literary and cultural conventions can be innovatively re-employed within 20th and 21th century literature to reveal new perspectives on contemporary Finnish and Nordic literature and ongoing cultural and social developments.
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Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Literature analyses experiences of the Finnish capital in prose fiction published in Finnish in the period 1890–1940. It examines the relationships that are formed between Helsinki and fictional characters, focusing, especially, on the way in which urban public space is experienced. Particular attention is given to the description of movement through urban space. The primary material consists of a selection of more than sixty novels, collections of short stories and individual short stories. This study draws on two sets of theoretical frameworks: on the one hand, the expanding field of literary studies of the city, and on the other hand, concepts provided by humanistic and critical geography, as well as by urban studies.
This study is the first monograph to examine Helsinki in literature written in Finnish. It shows that rich descriptions of urban life have formed an integral part of Finnish literature from the late nineteenth century onward.Around the turn of the twentieth century, literary Helsinki was approached from a variety of generic and thematic perspectives which were in close dialogue with international contemporary traditions and age-old images of the city, and defined by events typical of Helsinki’s own history. Helsinki literature of the 1920s and 1930s further developed the defining traits that took form around the turn of the century, adding a number of new thematic and stylistic nuances. The city experience was increasingly aestheticized and internalized. As the centre of the city became less prominent in literature,the margins of the city and specific socially defined neighbourhoods gained in importance.
Many of the central characteristics of how Helsinki is experienced in the literature published during this period remain part of the ongoing discourse on literary Helsinki: Helsinki as a city of leisure and light, inviting dreamy wanderings; the experience of a city divided along the fault lines of gender,class and language; the city as a disorientating and paralyzing cesspit of vice;the city as an imago mundi, symbolic of the body politic; the city of everyday and often very mundane experiences, and the city that invites a profound sense of attachment – an environment onto which characters project their innermost sentiments.
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White field, black seeds— who can sow? Although the riddle from which this these words are taken comes from oral tradition, it refers to the ability to write, a skill which in most Nordic countries was not regarded as necessary for everyone. And yet a significant number of ordinary people with no access to formal schooling took up the pen and produced a variety of highly interesting texts: diaries, letters, memoirs, collections of folklore and handwritten newspapers.
This collection presents the work of primarily Nordic scholars from fields such as linguistics, history, literature and folklore studies who share an interest in the production, dissemination and reception of written texts by non-privileged people during the long nineteenth century.
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