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Finnish Children’s Film
Children’s films have been an integral part of the Finnish film industry throughout the 2000s. Several films are produced annually, attracting vast audiences among both children and adults. Despite the significant role of children’s films in Finnish film culture as a whole, only little research has been conducted on the subject so far.
This collection of articles provides a fascinating overview on the past and present of Finnish children’s film and its complex role in today’s Finnish film culture. The contributors approach children’s film from a cross-disciplinary viewpoint, including perspectives from Film Studies, History, Childhood Studies and Educational Sciences. The book explores children’s film as a professional choice for Finnish filmmakers and as an international business card, while also assessing the pedagogical possibilities of strengthening multiliteracy. Lastly, through analyses and close-readings of different Finnish children’s films, the articles discuss themes such as girlhood, child-animal-relationships, imagery of death, and resistance to neoliberalism, and do so in novel ways.
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Exploring Pathways to Private Archives. A Multidisciplinary Approach to Historical, Cultural, and Literary Research
This anthology showcases a methodologically diverse range of archival research across literary studies, cultural history, folklore and memory studies, and historiography. It illuminates contemporary perspectives and challenges associated with archive usage. The chapters collectively advance the interdisciplinary dialogue on the utilization of private archival materials in literature and cultural traditions, underscoring the pivotal role these resources—whether ancient, recent, or emerging—play in research, and tackling the ethical dimensions of archival research.
The volume illustrates the breadth of questions that can and should be posed in archival research. It also delves into the element of surprise often encountered in the research process. Furthermore, the book discusses how the description and organization of materials, the availability of metadata, and the physical or digital nature of the archives shape scholarly investigations.
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Metamodernism. The Change in Literature and Culture in 21st Century Finland maps the state and transformation of contemporary Finnish literature and culture since the postmodern era. The work highlights, from different perspectives, how this change and the metamodernism it represents are manifested in contemporary Finnish literature and culture. The collection aims to offer a broad understanding of how metamodernism is seen and implemented in Finnish culture. Metamodernism outlines the framework theoretically, conceptualizing the new phase as a nascent metamodernity that is taking shape on a global scale in different societies and cultures, especially in the Western world. The book’s 15 chapters, although the majority focus on literature, explore a wide range of genres including rap poetry, experimental poetry and prose, speculative fiction and children’s literature.
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Magic, Past and Present
Magic, Past and Present brings together the latest interdisciplinary research by Finnish scholars on magic and witchcraft. The authors come from fields such as history, art, literature, religion, and culture. Geographically, the articles are set in Finland and its surrounding areas, and the time span is from the Middle Ages to the present day. The book’s chapters discuss magic and magic-users in a wide context, from medieval church paintings and their portrayed gender roles to the neoshamanism and paganism of the present day. They also address issues such as witchcraft accusations from the perspective of othering and groundbreaking figures like one of the first Finnish female magicians at the turn of the 21st century. The book is intended for scholars in various humanities fields, such as history, religious studies, folklore, and literature. A general audience will also find the book thought-provoking and informative.
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The Era of Cultural Television - Another History of Finnish Television in the 1970s and 1980s
The Era of Cultural Television offers a new interpretation of the Finnish television history of the 1970s and 1980s, which has previously been interpreted as a transitional period from the politicized 1970s to the liberalization of the late 1980s. The book suggests that Finnish television of this era was characterized by an ethos in which television was seen as a cultural resource for all, playing an important role in social planning and cultural citizenship.
While Finnish television has been studied mainly as a medium for entertainment and information, The Era of Cultural Television offers a new framework by approaching television from the perspective of cultural policy. At the same time, the book brings to the forefront programme types that, despite their importance, have been overlooked in previous research: television drama, international films and series, service programmes as well as educational programmes for children. The book challenges the convention of emphasizing the differences between public service and commercial television and shows that the commercial television company Mainos-TV (MTV) shared largely the same ethos as the public service Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yleisradio). The book highlights forgotten aspects of MTV’s history by describing how the company invested in art and history documentaries and developed new forms of addressing the challenges of modern life in its service programmes.
From the perspective of the current abundance of channels and streaming services, television of the 1970s and 1980s may seem scarce and limited. The Era of Cultural Television shows that scarcity is a retrospective interpretation that does not correspond to contemporary understanding of television. Television addressed an audience that was expected to be highly curious and inquisitive. Television viewers were catered for with a diverse selection of arts programmes, documentaries and educational programmes as well as entertainment. Television brought world cinema, contemporary drama, literature discussions and music education into homes. Current social issues were discussed in educational programmes as well as in drama and situation comedy. Through international programme cooperation, imported programmes and films, television broadened the world view of Finns and increased understanding of foreign languages, cultures and geography. Television programmes also dealt with controversial issues of history and brought out perspectives on the recent past that were not addressed in the history curriculum.
The Era of Cultural Television is based on extensive archival research. The work analyses both programmes, their press reception, and documents from television administration and production. The book is intended not only for readers interested in the history of television, but also for readers more broadly interested in Finnish culture and contemporary history. The book helps to understand how television has been a part of social planning, cultural policy and democratic development, and how television’s cultural programming supported the transition from agrarian Finland to postmodern urban Finland. The Era of Cultural Television is not a nostalgic look at the past. Rather, it invites us to think about what television means today, when the cultural programming of television has spread across different platforms, addressing small taste groups rather than a diverse national public.
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The Writer’s Poetics. Poetics as an Approach to an Author’s Body of Work is an introduction to the writer’s poetics as a distinctive research orientation, as well as a collection of case studies focusing on authors working in different eras and languages. While the 20th Century traditions of poetics have produced studies on the textual styles and techniques that characterize the writing of particular authors, the research orientation has not been explicitly defined and sufficiently theorized. The Writer’s Poetics frames the research orientation theoretically, and the 14 case studies making up the chapters demonstrate the diversity of viewpoints available within it. The contributors study authors ranging from 19th Century Finnish-Swedish female writers to 20th Century African-American novelists to postmodernist and contemporary authors of prose and lyric – and to the most successful Finnish rap artists of the 2010’s.
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Finnish-Russian Literary Relations 1800-1930
Current volume examines Finnish-Russian literary contacts that have not been thoroughly studied previously – the translation and reception history of Russian literature in Finland, and Finnish literature in Russia from 1800 until 1930. Personal contacts have influenced the decisions of what to translate and by whom more than the evident European context of Russian literature. In Finland, the relationship with Russia and attitudes to its literature have always been a political issue. Hostile relations have meant a remarkable decrease in translations, but maintained active discussion of Russian culture. During more friendly times, the inquisitive interest has increased and led to more intensive translation activities. However, since the early days of Finnish literature, only few intellectuals have known Russian well enough to translate literature into Swedish or Finnish. Consequently, translating has been highly dependent on individual mediators, often with a transnational identity.
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Superdiversity. Perspectives on the multiplicity of migration
This book is the first Finnish-language collection of research on superdiversity. At the core of the book is the growing migration to Finland since the turn of the 1990s and its numerous effects on Finnish society. The interdisciplinary examination of superdiversity is important at the current moment: Finland as a society has reached the point where certain social categories, such as ethnic background, country of birth, mother tongue or gender, are not necessarily sufficient to understand the increased diversity and its consequences.
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Interpreting brothers-in-war. Multilingual day-to-day life during the Continuation War in Finland
This volume looks at the Finnish-German military alliance (1941–1944) as a translation zone – a multilingual network of military, administrative and civilian encounters that was held together by linguistically versed soldiers and civilians acting as interpreters and translators. It focuses on interpreters and liaison officers of the Finnish Liaison Staff in Rovaniemi, who were assigned to the staffs of the German army units with the task of maintaining communication between the two armies and assisting German troops in their daily matters. Furthermore, attention is paid to Finnish civilians, especially women whose language skills made them candidates for a range of mediation tasks in the German units. The reconstruction of military interpreters’ and liaison officers’ tasks and mediation agency between the two military cultures is based on their war-time weekly reports, whereas the civilian interpreters’ experiences are drawn from a variety of autobiographical accounts, including interviews.
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The Nature of Words. Writings on the Poetics and Environments of Vernacular Expression
In recent decades, the focus of Folklore Studies has shifted from analysing the products of oral traditions as texts to examining the ways in which people use and produce these items, and the areas of study have broadened to include vernacular cultures and genres in diverse verbal and material forms. As evident from the introduction and twelve chapters of this collection, these interests are today shared by several disciplines that cooperate in the area of cultural studies. This book provides insights into current questions about the “nature” of words: it discusses both the inherent essence of vernacular expression and how that essence is tied to various genre-ecological, performative, and material environments. The chapters include studies on the poetics, form, function, performance, and composition of traditional and new vernacular forms, including explorations of hybridity, materiality, and change, as well as critical examinations of archival practices and publication processes.
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