Download Free The Emergence Of Finnish Book And Reading Culture In The 1700s Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Emergence Of Finnish Book And Reading Culture In The 1700s and write the review.

Book culture has emerged as an extremely dynamic and border-crossing field of research, internationally and in Finland. The editors and most of the writers of this book were members of the organizing and program committees of the 18th Annual Conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), Book Culture from Below, that took place in Helsinki in 2010. This book provides, for the first time in English, an overview of an important epoch in Finnish book and reading history. Besides depicting book culture at the periphery of Europe, it contributes to our understanding of the power of the urbanized European literary world of the 1700s. The new reading culture that emerged in Finland during the 1700s affected readers and all levels of society in many ways. Along with other trends, the arrival of translated fiction and Enlightenment literature from Europe opened and irrevocably altered the Finns’ world view. The change was especially pronounced in cities. Scholars, merchants, craftspersons, as well as military officers stationed at Helsinki’s offshore Sveaborg fortress, acquired world literature and guides intended for professionals at, for example, book auctions. In this book, researchers from different fields examine the significance and influence of that era’s books from cultural, historical, ideological, and social perspectives. What kinds of books did the citizens of Helsinki really buy, loan, and read during the 1700s? What topics and ideas introduced by the new literature were discussed in salons and reading circles? Who were the books’ large-scale consumers? Who were the literary opinion leaders of their times? Why did people read? Did the books change their readers’ lives?
Traditionally, oral traditions were considered to diffuse only orally, outside the influence of literature and other printed media. Eventually, more attention was given to interaction between literacy and orality, but it is only recently that oral tradition has come to be seen as a modern construct both conceptually and in terms of accessibility. Oral traditions cannot be studied independently from the culture of writing and reading. Lately, a new interdisciplinary interest has risen to study interconnections between oral tradition and book culture. In addition to the use and dissemination of printed books, newspapers etc., book culture denotes manuscript media and the circulation of written documents of oral tradition in and through the archive, into published collections. Book culture also intertwines the process of framing and defining oral genres with literary interests and ideologies. In addition to writing and reading, the study of oral traditions must also take into consideration the culture of publishing. The present volume highlights varied and selected aspects of the expanding field of research into oral tradition and book culture. The questions discussed include the following: How have printing and book publishing set terms for oral tradition scholarship? How have the practices of reading affected the circulation of oral traditions? Which books and publishing projects have played a key role in this and how? How have the written representations of oral traditions, as well as the roles of editors and publishers, introduced authorship to materials customarily regarded as anonymous and collective? The editors represent some of the key institutions in the study of oral traditions in Finland: the University of Helsinki, the Finnish Literature Society, and the University of Eastern Finland. The authors are folklorists, anthropologists, historians and literary historians, and scholars in information studies from Finland, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, and the United States.
This book studies the ”grey area” of the success story of rural lending libraries in the Nordic countries through the activities of people’s libraries in one area of Central Finland. The study explores the influence of social, cultural, geographical and economic phenomena, such as the spread of revivalist movements, on the reading habits of the local population and reveals interesting reasons why the establishment of elementary schools and popular libraries and the growth of functional literacy did not automatically increase the informational capital of the common people of remote regions or lead to their social advancement. This study represents a methodological experiment in describing the life history of a people’s library. The combination of collective biographical and transnational comparative methods with rarely utilized original sources in this study is innovative and has not been used before in Finnish historical research on functional literacy and popular libraries. The advantage of the comparison is that it reveals the attitudes to libraries that were characteristic of each of the cultures involved. For the people of the Finnish countryside in the late nineteenth century, libraries represented a way of acquiring new information that was still strange and unwelcome. The distribution of immaterial capital was extremely uneven with regard to age, gender and social rank. In the earlier Finnish research has not very often been analysed, how the communal status of the peasant reader and his or her personal networks in the local community affected the quality of his or her reading habits. This book shows, that the location of the library in its local community and on the other hand the status and position of its customers in their networks, had a great significance on the use of the library and thus to the improvement of reading skills.
This anthology ‘The Culture of the Finnish Roma’ is a highly needed collection of articles intended for a wide audience, in Finland and internationally. The editors of the anthology, when participating in many international conferences and seminars, have often been asked: Is there Roma research in Finland? What is it like? Which perspectives does it utilize? The main function of this anthology is to reply to those questions. It compiles an array of contemporary Roma research done in present day Finland, both by Finnish, Finnish Roma, and international scholars. It will be of interest to both academic as well as lay readers interested in Roma culture and Roma life in Finland, past and present. The chapters focus on the research and the life of Roma in Finland. Bringing to light the various sides of the Romani way of life, scholars from different fields include historians, linguists, anthropologists, and cultural and social researchers. Many of the previous books have suffered from a recycling of materials that mythologize and stereotype Romani people. Including the viewpoint of Roma scholars and diverse research branches ranging from culture, language, religion, and gender, the anthology aims at overcoming the stereotypes and bring knowledge of aspects of Romani life. The eternal contemplation and negotiation of identities lies in the heart of any culture. We hope that the way The Culture of the Finnish Roma discusses these issues brings forth interesting topics to consider for any reader, regardless of national or ethnic origin.
This book examines phenomena from Finnish and Finnish-Swedish literature written in the years between the 1980s and the first decade of the new millennium. Its objective is to study this interesting era of literary history in Finland and to sketch some possible directions for future development by identifying literary turning points which have already occurred.
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.
The Finnish language is perhaps best known for its rich case system. Depending on the definition of a case, Finnish has at least fourteen, possibly fifteen or even more cases. This volume is the first comprehensive English-language account of the Finnish case system, focusing primarily on its semantic functions. This collection of articles presents an up-to-date overview of the Finnish case system, analyses central subsystems within it, and offers data-based analyses of the functions of individual cases. The authors approach Finnish cases from different perspectives within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. The volume also addresses more general topics, such as the notion of case, questions of polysemy, the traditional division of cases into grammatical and semantic, the relationship between inflection and derivation as well as the role of inflection in the structuring of the categories of adpositions and adverbs. The book will be of interest to linguists and students as well as to those readers who are not familiar with cognitive linguistics. The analyses presented here will be relevant to anyone investigating the essence of case and the emergence of linguistic meaning.
This volume analyses the societal legacy of Lutheranism in Finland in broad terms. It contributes to the recent renewed interest in the history of religion in Finland and the Nordic countries by bringing together researchers in history, political science, economics, social psychology, education, linguistics, media studies, and theology to examine the mutual relationship between Lutheranism and society in Finland. The two main foci are (i) the historical effects of the Reformation and its aftermath on societal structures and on national identity, values, linguistic culture, education, and the economy, and (ii) the adaptation of the church – and its theology – to changes in the geo-political and sociocultural context. Important sub-themes include nationalism and religion, the secularization and institutionalization of traditional values, multiple Protestant ethics, and long continuities in history. Overall the book argues that large changes in societies cannot be explained via ‘secular’ factors alone, such as economic development or urbanization, but that factors pertaining to religion provide substantial explanatory power for understanding societal change and the resulting societal structures.
This edited collection re-examines the long history of Finnish-Namibian relations through the lens of colonialism without colonies as well as anti-colonialism. The book argues that although Finland never acquired colonies, Namibia was once treated in the areas of culture and knowledge formation in a manner now recognised as colonial. Namibian people’s ways of being in the world was transformed when the Finnish Missionary Society started its work in Owambo in 1870 and introduced Christianity and European modes of education, medicine, material culture and social practices. In time, cultural colonialism faded and during the Namibian struggle for independence from South African rule in 1966–1990 Finns took an actively anti-colonial approach. The book was written as a collaborative effort of Namibian, Finnish and South African scholars.
This volume addresses the prominent, and in many ways highly similar, role that historical fiction has played in the formation of the two neighbouring 'young nations', Finland and Estonia. It gives a multi-sided overview of the function of the historical novel during different periods of Finnish and Estonian history from the 1800s until the present day, and it provides detailed close-readings of selected authors and literary trends in their social, political and cultural contexts. This book addresses nineteenth-century 'fictional foundations', historical fiction of the new nation states in the interwar period as well as post-Second World War Soviet Estonian novels and modern historiographic metafiction.