Composing Finnish National History (original) (raw)
Related papers
History, the Historical Novel and Nation. The First Finnish Historical Novels as National Narrative
2002
An active construction of the national identity in Finland started in the 1840s. A primary activity was the creation of the national narrative in fictional works. The novels now published were -unlike the dominant epical genre -able to present the national feeling in a modern nationalistic way. Especially the historical novel was the first nationally coloured literary genre in many European countries. It is focal for the forming of a group identity to describe a common prehistory that legitimates the present. The first historical novels in Finland saw daylight in the works of Zacharias Topelius and Fredrika Runeberg. My research looks at the ways their novels present and construct the national historical narrative. Both authors feature a similar idea of the Finnish nation and its birth, but they handle it differently. Topelius writes more about the political history of distinguished men while Runeberg looks at history from a viewpoint that is nearer the everyday life and the common people.
Novels, Histories, Novel Nations: Historical Fiction And Cultural Memory In Finland and Estonia
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. The overall focus is on traditions of writing rather than on isolated highpoints; on chains of transnational influences and on narrative elements that recur both synchronically and diachronically. The volume shows historical fiction prefigured many narratives, tropes, heroes and events that academic history writing later adopted. The comparison of the two literary traditions also opens up a much broader view of how historical novels narrate the nation. While existing explorations of historical fiction have mostly been written from the perspective of the old and great nations, this book shows that the traditions of the young nations ‘without history’ often challenge many mainstream views on the genre.
Forging a master narrative for a nation: Finnish history as a script during the Second World War
Scandinavian Journal of History, 2022
In our article, we study how Finnish historians produced historical texts to be applied inside the Finnish army to give lessons, speeches, and informal talks to the rank-and-file soldiers during two periods: first during the Winter War of 1939–40 and then in the last stages of the Continuation War in 1944. Employing narratological methodology to this task, we examine the purposeful construction of a master narrative of the national past by telling the story of ‘Finland’ and the ‘Finnish people’ in their perpetual, existential fight against Russia. We approach the history texts as emergent scripts that were offered to the particular audience of soldiers so that they would internalize the historical framework of their current situation and experiences. The history texts underline the inevitable continuity and teleology of Finnish history. This is done by constructing a vast historical context into which the hardships of the present moment are embedded through repeating crucial past images and analogues, which reserved the role of sufferer and experiencer for the Finnish people. The historians’ wartime accounts offer a case where the master narrative is purposefully built and propagated under official auspices.
Historical Culture and the Mediated Narratives of Nation
2021
Academic history is only one of the many forms of mediating history. Popular practices, such as entertainment, identity projects and policy justifications often have a more effective role in historical culture than academic history. Public traditions, such as national commemorations are the central scenes of historical culture. They call for a discussion of the essence of nations and nationalism in the public sphere. During globalisation and the rise of multiculturalism, national histories are increasingly said to be a ‘broken mirror’: there are several and contested narratives about a nation. On the other hand, there is also a strong tendency to emphasise and reinforce national ‘master narratives’ among nations evoked by social-national conservatism and the overall rise of populist nationalism. This essay discusses what role historical culture and historical consciousness plays in the narrating of a nation. The starting point here is Finnish historical culture. The essay suggests a...
Orbis Litterarum, 2019
This article analyses four history plays, published between 1837 and 1869 in Sweden and Finland, and asks how the playwrights of the early nineteenth century represented the same premodern episode: the unsuccessful peasant uprising called the Club War (1596–1597). The focus is on the plays’ dramatis personae, and the article will make comparable suggestions of the themes and topics each protagonist brings to the stage. The article studies literary factors that contributed to the persistent afterlife and continuous cultural resonance of these dramatic events, and addresses the dynamics between historical fiction and scholarly history in the production of collectively meaningful pasts. As one of the results the paper demonstrates that a somewhat surprising historical hero surfaced when the 1590s were adapted in the context of a new nationalism. Methodologically the article combines computational distant reading and more traditional close reading to disclose the core characters of each play individually, and, taken together, of the early fictional ‘story space’ of the event. The article argues that even such small‐scale investigations can benefit from the systematic analytical tools offered by digital humanities that can reveal wholly new facets of the texts that more traditional literary history may overlook.
Writing Histories, Making Nations: A Review Essay
Since the 1990s we have seen an increasing number of studies in the history of national history writing, in the ways in which peoples construct nations through the production of historiography. But a major breakthrough was made with a five-year ESF Scientific Programme “Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in Europe" (2003–2008), resulting in a eight-volume book series “Writing the Nation” published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2008–2015. This review essay delineates, first, the general architectonics of the series, to give an overview of its main results and findings. Then, secondly, some critical- methodological points are raised and some perspectives for future research suggested.