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Because of its history, art, and natural and cultural landscapes, Italy has been a popular destination for North-European travellers since the age of the Grand Tour. Yet, literary images of Italy are not all linked to the tradition of the journey to this country and cannot be labelled as a manifestation of Northerners’ yearning for the Southern sun. The corpus of critical literature which deals with Italy in Nordic literatures is very wide but also fragmentary. While many scholars have written about this topic and chiefly on the relations between individual Scandinavian literatures or well-known authors – such as Henrik Ibsen, Selma Lagerlöf and Hans Christian Andersen – and Italy, fe...
The first major anthology of Finnish literature in translation, containing substantial representation of most major figures of the postwar period. The primary material is supplemented by essays and translations of essays by writers, scholars, and critics.
The literature of Finland is bilingual, with lively and extensive traditions in both Finnish and Swedish. This history covers both literary traditions in detail. The volume?s first section, on Finnish-language literature, consists of a series of connected chapters by leading authorities within the field. It opens with a consideration of the folk literature in Finnish that flourished during the Middle Ages and then examines the more recent history of Finnish-language literature, with special emphasis placed on writings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The second part of the book provides an examination of Finland?s Swedish-language literature from the late fifteenth century through the early nineteenth century. Subsequent chapters trace developments in Finland?s Swedish-language literature during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A survey of children?s literature?from both the Finnish- and Swedish-language traditions?concludes this exceptionally thorough volume.
Through informative, original, and incisive case studies in postmodern economics, philosophy, literary criticism, feminism, pedagogy, poetry, painting, historiography, and cultural studies, this book demonstrates that disorganization and disaggregation characterize postmodern times. Postmodern phenomena, Leitch argues, resemble imploded geological formations with historical strata in kaleidoscopic disarray, and that neither economics, nor politics, nor culture escapes this novel form. Among the influential figures analyzed are Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, John Caputo, Jacques Derrida, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Henry Giroux, Stanley Aronowitz, Linda Hutcheon, Fredric Jameson, J. Hillis Miller, Pentti Saarikoski, and Julian Schnabel.
This is the first book written for an English language audience on the work of the Finland-Swedish author, Runar Schildt (1888-1925). Schildt was a highly cosmopolitan writer, who kept a keen eye on the latest continental prose and showed an affinity for the literary decadence that was in fashion around the turn-of-the-century, as well as early modernism. He worked as a literary critic, a theater director, and a translator, which kept him in touch with the latest literary trends in Europe. The book posits that Schildt’s work bears witness to the turbulent times he lived in: he saw his native Finland transformed from a Grand Duchy of Russia to a republic, against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution and the Finnish Civil War. Schildt’s literary career provides important cultural and historical insights into this significant moment of modern European history.
This open access book explores the organization and evolution of Finlands Cold War cultural diplomacy (1945-1975) as the basis for a reflection on the countrys foreign relations, the link between culture and politics, small states autonomy during the Cold War, and the porosity of the East-West divide. The book offers a historical survey of the development of Finlands cultural diplomacy as part of the Finnish states foreign activities. In its empirical parts, it focuses on archives drawn from the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education in order to explain Finlands cultural diplomacy as the result of the countrys foreign policy orientations, interactions between domes...
Lying on the border between eastern and western Christendom, Orthodox Karelia preserved its unique religious culture into the 19th and 20th centuries, when it was described and recorded by Finnish and Karelian folklore collectors. This colorful array of ritulas and beliefs involving nature spirits, saints, the dead, and pilgrimage to monasteries represented a unigue fusion of official Church ritual and doctrine and pre-Christian ethnic folk belief. This book undertakes a fascinating exploration into many aspects of Orthodox Karelian ritual life: beliefs in supernatural forces, folk models of illness, body concepts, divination, holy icons, the role of the ritual specialist and healer, the divide between nature and culture, images of forest, the cult of the dead, and the popular image of monasteries and holy hermits. It will appeal to anyone interested in popular religion, the cognitive study of religion, ritual studies, medical anthropology, and the folk traditions and symbolism of the Balto-Finnic peoples.