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Terrains of Imagination in Contemporary Finnish Literature
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 oeuvr...
Plots of War
Plots of War: Modern Narratives of Conflict discusses the dynamics of change and transformation that underlie the troubled project of modernity and shows how deeply it has been shaped by war and violence. The narrative of war, the emplotment of violence in historic and mainly in symbolic terms, is deeply embedded in the construction of individual and collective memories, but it also helps to shape the mediation of future conflicts.What is ultimately at stake here is the complex figuration and mediation of the violence of war in ever more hyper-mediated ways with direct consequences to the production of identities and processes of cultural memory.
Translating the Monster
What can Finland’s greatest and supposedly least translatable novel tell us about translation and world literature?
Rhetorics of Nordic Democracy
Democracy is today a concept that is overwhelmingly positively evaluated almost everywhere. A lot has been written about socio-economic and cultural backgrounds of democratic regimes as well as their institutional settings. By contrast, not much is known about the political manoeuvres and speech acts by which 'democracy' has been tied to particular regions and cultures in concrete historical situations. This book discusses a series of efforts to rhetorically produce a particular Nordic version of democracy. It shows that the rhetorical figure 'Nordic democracy' was a product of the age of totalitarianism and the Cold War. It explores the ways in which 'Nordic democracy' was used, mainly by the social democrats, to provide the welfare politics with cultural and historical legitimacy and foundations. Thus, it also acknowledges the ideological and geopolitical context in which the 'Nordic welfare state' was conceptualised and canonised. The contributors of the book are specialists on Nordic politics and history, who share a particular interest in political rhetoric and conceptual history.
Literature, Interpretation and Ethics
Literature, Interpretation and Ethics argues for the centrality of hermeneutics in the context of ongoing debates about the value and values of literature, and about the role and ethics of literary study. Hermeneutics is the endeavor to understand the nature of interpretation, as it poses vital questions about how we make sense of works of art, our own lives, other people and the world around us. The book outlines the contribution of hermeneutics to literary study through detailed accounts of role of interpretation in the work of key thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. It also illustrates problems of interpre...
Nordic Speculative Fiction
This volume brings together scholarly theories and practices on speculative fiction from the Nordic countries, including Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, that are all rooted in similar values, culture, and history yet are independent and unique societies. The book exhibits both the convergences and the diversity of the Nordics in fiction and fandom as well as in research. It traces the roots of Nordic speculative fiction, how it has developed over time, and how the changes in Nordic environments and societies caused by overhanging shared global issues – such as climate change, mass migration, and technological acceleration – find space in speculative practices. The first of...
New Perspectives on Dystopian Fiction in Literature and Other Media
This collection of essays examines various forms of dystopian fiction in literature, television, and digital games. It frames the timely trend of dystopian fiction as a thematic field that accommodates several genres from societal dystopia to apocalyptic narratives and climate fiction, many of them examining the hazards of science and technology to human societies and the ecosystem. These are genres of the Anthropocene par excellence, capturing the dilemmas of the human condition in the current, increasingly precarious epoch. The essays offer new interpretations of classical and contemporary works, including the canonised prose of Orwell, Atwood and Cormac McCarthy, modern pop culture classics like Battlestar Galactica, Fallout and Hunger Games, and the work of Johanna Sinisalo, a pioneer of Finnish speculative fiction. From Thomas Pynchon to Watership Down, the volume’s multifaceted approach offers fresh perspectives to those already familiar with existing research, but it is no less accessible for newcomers to the ever-expanding field of dystopian studies.
Novels, Histories, Novel Nations
Since its emergence along with Western nationalism, historical fiction has been one of the key forms for constructing national histories - and it has not lost its importance even today. This volume highlights the cultural work historical fiction performed in Finland and Estonia ca. 1800-2000 in the ongoing articulation of national identities. This book comprises of a theoretical preface, a comparative survey of Finnish and Estonian historical fiction in their socio-political contexts, case studies by literary scholars and historians and a summary chapter by Ann Rigney that places Finnish and Estonian historical fiction in a broader European perspective. This volume is highly relevant to acad...
Gendered Rural Spaces
Rural spaces are connected with different cultural, economic, social and political codes and meanings. In this book these meanings are analysed through gender. The articles concretely show the process of producing gender and the ways in which accepted gender-based behaviour has been constructed at different times and in different groups. Discussion of gendered spaces leads to wider questions such as power relations and displacement in society. The changing rural processes are analysed on the micro level, and the focus is set on how these changes affect people's everyday lives. Answers are looked for questions like how are individuals responding to these changes? What are their strategies, solutions and tactics? How have they experienced the change process?
Novel Districts
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 F...
