Suchergebnisse

Tradition and literature are not held back by borders. Transnationality is, for example, geographic, symbolic, or linguistic movement and action. Different kinds of cultural transitions and migrant traditions are connected with transnationality. Studying the multilingualism of literary texts or diverse cultural identities, transnationality is a prolific angle. In the 102nd Yearbook of the Kalevala Society Foundation, the topics cover for example migration and return migration, material things crossing borders, and places of music culture. At a more theoretical level we are asking how studying transnationality enriches the disciplines with roots in the national sciences.

Tourism must be planned and developed differently from what is customary today, as growth in rigid economic terms is still prioritised over the cultural and socioecological sustainability of lived-in cultural and natural environments. The global ecological crisis can no longer be ignored by tourism developers and investors – or by tourists.
The seventeen authors of this book are from a variety of disciplines and fields of expertise. Through research-driven and profession based knowledge on different aspects of tourism planning in Finland and elsewhere, they offer transformative perspectives and practical applications for responsible tourism planners, investors and political decision-makers to utilise.
Through the book's overarching themes – learnings from the history of tourism planning, wellbeing, participation, building and architecture, people and infrastructure – it addresses a general audience, professional communities, and academic communities. The book's urgent quest is to prevent tourism from remaining one of the causes for the greatest problem of all time, the worsening baseline of living conditions on Earth.

The nineteenth century has been called an age of monuments. In some places even one piece made a difference. This book is a study of the intellectual background and physical making of Finland's first public sculpture, the statue of Professor Henrik Gabriel Porthan by Carl Eneas Sjöstrand. The idealised but sombre Porthan was born under the influence of German neoclassicism. Development on the project was slow but sure. The Swedish artist had to be supported over three years while he was putting together his first monumental piece in Munich and Rome, after which came another three years wait before the cast arrived to Finland. The bronze sculpture, commissioned by the Finnish Literary Society and raised by public subscriptions from people of all classes, was unveiled in the city of Turku in September 1864. Finns took some pride in the fact that, unlike other nations that had raised monuments to kings and generals, here the first place was given to a scholar. In this study Sjöstrand's pioneering bronze is placed in a wider context and compared with works by his precursors and contemporaries in the international sculptor colony of Rome.

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.

Finland was an autonomous Grand Duchy in the Russian Empire during the years 1808–1917. At this time nationalism as well as other ideologies reached Finland from Europe, which strengthened the willingness to change both in society and on a governmental level. The Fennoman movement, which was a movement focusing both on language and on nationalism, became the core of the Finnish self-perception. The goal was to define Finland as a coherent and separate country in relation to its neighbouring countries. Collecting folk poems and learning to know one's home country became essential. People saw the Kalevala poems as a way to understand and define the Finnish identity and the history of the Finnish people. Especially young people with a background in academia were intrigued by these ideas. University students collected poems all over the Grand Duchy of Finland as well as in the Russian part of Carelia, in Sweden, Norway and in Ingria. Students who collected these folk poems also wrote travelogues about their travels and all this material was handed over to The Finnish Literature Society. These documents are unique and there has not been much research done on them, especially with the focus on how the young academic generation during the age of autonomy defined their home country, their national self-perception, themselves and the commoners living in the rural parts of the country. This book reviews travelogues written by one hundred university students who travelled in the country collecting folk poems during 1836–1917. The book offers insight into how the students described Finland and what it meant to be Finnish. Travelogues can be defined as a sort of hybrid of texts. They consist of a mixture of letters, journals, biographical texts and travel books. Consequently, the image that the students depict of Finland is in this study based upon research perspectives and methods used in textual research, oral history and travel literature. The travelogues written by students previously evoked the interest of researchers who mainly studied certain traits of poem collectors, tradition bearers or poems. However, the travelogues contain plenty of information about the lives of the people who lived in the areas where the poems were collected. The descriptions of Finland in the travelogues do not represent the "real" 19th century Finland, but instead it is a story written and created by university students. The characteristics that are presented in The Land of Hope are based on how the intelligentsia perceived "real" Finnishness as opposed to the uneducated commoners living in the rural parts of the country. The most notable themes in the travelogues are the state and the future of the society and of being Finnish. Another theme is the otherization of those who were uneducated commoners. These themes describe the fears and hopes that university students had about Finland. They also show us that the travelogues were ideological texts about Finland and Finnishness that united the collectors of folk poetry. This book studies the collection of folk poetry in the context of the ideologies during the age of autonomy and it explains what the collection of poems meant and who were involved in it. Furthermore, the book gives an insight into the possibilities to pursue academic studies and it also presents the most essential sources of students' knowledge about Finland at that point of time.

Participatory approaches and co-research are increasingly employed in the current moment for exploring barriers to equality. Co-research treats research participants as experts in their own lives and as equal research partners. Research conducted with this orientation is based on research problems drafted by the research participants themselves from their aspirations regarding the research process and an active partnership that considers the interests of all parties involved. Participatory methods are used in co-research, particularly for the purpose of deepening the contextualisation of research knowledge about structurally vulnerable or subordinated groups and to challenge the power positions associated with traditional research designs. In co-research, the role of the people involved in the research is more central than in more traditional research. One of the key principles of co-research is that co-investigators (a) can participate in various roles, (b) have the opportunity to participate in different phases of the research according to their own interests and resources, and (c) co-investigators' participation can take many forms, including differences in intensity. The idea is to provide more people with opportunities to contribute to the knowledge production about themselves and their communities from their respective perspectives and interests. Co-research is also seen as an opportunity to improve the relevance and usefulness of scientific knowledge. It aims to genuinely increase interaction and openness and extend science's societal responsibility. In this book, we approach co-research as a means to promote social justice, as an action with a societal impact contributor to social impact and as a means to promote the societal responsibility of science. We discuss and evaluate the ideals of the co-research process concerning the everyday challenges and practices in research. Above all, we offer the knowledge and experience generated by our own projects to support those planning or already implementing co-research projects.

Alex Matson (1888–1972) is an important Finnish literary critic and essayist, whose literary reviews and collections of essays have made a vital contribution to the development of Finland's postwar literary generation. Born in Finland as the son of a sailor, Matson moved as a young child with his family to Hull in England, where he went to school. In the 1910s, he moved back to Finland, where he at first established himself as painter associated with the expressionist November Group, an important Finnish artistic movement at the time. In the interbellum, he moved from fine arts to literature. In the 1920s and 1930s, he published several novels, but more important was his work as transmitter of international literary ideas to Finland. Together with his first wife, Kersti Bergroth, he edited the literary journal Sininen kirja (""The Blue Book""; 1927–1930), which was inspired by the writings of John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield. Sininen kirja is the most international literary journal in Finnish history to date and introduced Finland to the most significant modernist writers of the first half of the 20th century (Gottfried Benn, Jean Cocteau, Alfred Döblin, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Paul Valéry, Virginia Woolf).
During the Second World War, Matson worked for the State Communications Agency, which was responsible for disseminating relevant information about Finland to other nations and for informing Finns of relevant developments abroad. It was also tasked with studying the prevailing mood among the population in Finland. In Matson's unpublished wartime diaries, one can see the first symptoms of a shift in Finnish culture away from Germany and towards Anglo-Saxon culture.
From the 1940s onwards, Matson recommended new English and American novels as a part of his work as reader for Finnish publishing houses, and he also translated works by Joyce, Hemingway and Steinbeck. With the help of a network of international literary critics, Matson became acquainted with New Criticism, which he introduced to Finland before it became established among academic researchers. He was often critical of academic literary studies, but his seminal essay works Romaanitaide (""On the Prose Novel""; 1947), John Steinbeck (1948), Kaksi mestaria (""Two Masters"", on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky; 1950) as well as his impressive conversational skills were instrumental in introducing knowledge about the principles of the prose novel to several authors (including Väinö Linna, Lauri Viita, and Hannu Salama), and contributed to their views of literature. Matson emphasized the importance of reading and understanding high-quality literature for the wellbeing of society.

The book presents the biographies and work lists of 126 Finnish women composers born between 1784 and 1909. Based on large-scale archival research, it is the first comprehensive historical account of Finnish women composers and their cultural heritage. The authors draw on feminist music history and the sociohistorical approach to find out who these women were, what kind of music they wrote, and how their careers reflected European cultural and social history. The treatise highlights the influence of girls' schools, women's suffrage movements and other socio-political developments on the musical culture of women. Concepts such as "composer", "woman" and "Finnish" were assumed to be open and inclusive throughout the research, in terms of both musical style and diversity in cultural background. In concentrating on music-making by women, the book opens up radically new vistas on Finland's music and cultural history, and it rectifies previous erroneous conceptions about women's composership and their artistic work. In short, it exposes the richness in the sonic and intellectual heritage of Finnish women composers, as well as its significance in society today.

The Centre Party of Finland was represented in almost all cabinets for decades, and it often held the post of prime minister during the reign of President Urho Kekkonen. When Kekkonen's deteriorating health forced him to resign in 1981, the Centre Party, formerly the Agrarian Union, was in front of the crisis. The party was deeply divided along the lines of who would be the best candidate to succeed Kekkonen. The schism had prevailed for years, and contemporaries suspected the party would split up or at least lose its dominant position in Finnish politics. Besides, the numbers of core supporters making up the party, agrarians, were constantly diminishing. In addition, the Finnish party system was in a state of flux. The Finnish People's Democratic League was in a deep downward spiral, while the Conservative Party's support was ascendant. The power struggle between the three 'big' parties, the Centre Party, the Social Democratic Party and the Conservative Party, was fierce. The study describes and analyses how the Center Party survived the challenges it faced. How was the cohesion of the party rebuilt and maintained? How did the Centre Party manage to survive the inter-party contests and end up being the strongest party in the elections of 1991? The study is firmly based on source material from the party organization of the Centre Party and other relevant political actors, such as President Mauno Koivisto. The book provides new information on both Finnish domestic and foreign politics and the power struggles among the parties and leading political figures.