Ilona Pikkanen

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.

For centuries, the Club War, a popular uprising on Finnish territory in the 1590s, constituted a minor side story in Swedish royal historiography. After the Napoleonic Wars, it was quickly appropriated as one of the most canonical historical events in the emerging Finnish national history. This article argues that, in order to understand the role of the Club War in early 19th-century Finnish historical culture, it is necessary to
trace its interpretive tradition backwards in time, across established borders of national historiographies, in a thematic, transtemporal, and comparative framework. The paper will discuss eight pieces of Swedish and Finnish history writing from 1620 to 1860, focusing on the storylines, attributes attached to the protagonists, and historical agency
allocated to different social groups against a backdrop of sources available within each context of writing, in order to pinpoint and analyse moments when the story space of the event altered. The article will demonstrate that textual traditions of regions that formerly
belonged to multi-ethnic or conglomerate states provide particularly interesting material for transtemporal historiography. Through this case study, the article also argues that Swedish and Finnish historiography of the early 19th century should be studied as one, entangled, textual culture.

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.

In this paper, we discuss potential directions and implications of a short research project that set out to detect fictional content in digitised historical newspaper archive of the National Library of Finland. Our endeavour was motivated by and oriented around by an overarching question: what would literary history look like if, instead of focusing solely on canonical books, we accounted for the works published in journals and newspapers as well? For pragmatic reasons, we decided to focus on poetry and use a supervised machine learning approach. The lack of metadata that would denote content structure and content type posed the biggest challenge, but in the final dataset the poetry content had risen to a total of 18,591 text blocks with poetic content, with overall precision rates verging on 90 %. We argue that even these preliminary results demonstrate that studying works of fiction found in newspapers is a task worth undertaking. Moreover, the corpus extracted can already enable content-oriented research and we discuss some methods enabling this in the article. Finally, our paper suggests that a data-rich history of Finnish newspaper literature is an attainable goal in time, and it has great potential for challenging the current understanding of the Finnish literary past.

This paper presents the vision of aggregating, harmonizing, and publishing letter catalogue metadata (information e.g. of senders, receivers and datings of letters) from cultural heritage (CH) institutions in Finland as a single reconciled Linked Open Data (LOD) service and a semantic portal providing data analytical tools for researchers. The research is conducted as part of the consortium research project Constellations of Correspondence (CoCo). The target of the project is to study – for the first time – scattered, heterogeneous epistolary metadata regarding the period of the Grand Duchy of Finland (1809–1917) as one, integrated dataset and make it interoperable and available. This will enable scholars to ask ambitious research questions in the field of computer science and to conduct empirical, bottom-up case studies e.g. on epistolary culture, communicative networks, and heritagization processes. This paper discusses one of the first datasets acquired by the project, the letter...

Artikkelissa tarkastellaan kansa-käsitteen käyttöä ja siihen liittyviä muutoksia ja jännitteitä Suomessa pitkällä aikavälillä 1820-luvulta 2010-luvulle. Aineistolähtöisessä artikkelissa analysoidaan neljän tapausesimerkin avulla sitä, mitä kansa-käsitteellä ja sen johdannaisilla on tehty ja miten käsitystä kansasta ja kansanomaisesta on tuotettu eri aikoina. Analyysin kohteena ovat 1800-luvun alun varhaiset kansanrunojulkaisut, ensimmäiset suomenkielisen kirjallisuuden kirjallisuushistoriat, kansanrunoudentutkimuksen muuttuva kuva kansanrunojen ja kansanperinteen tuottajista sekä 2000-luvulla käynnistynyt 1800-luvun itseoppineiden kansankirjoittajien tutkimus. Artikkeli tuo esiin kansa-käsitteeseen liittyviä käsitehistoriallisia jatkuvuuksia ja havainnollistaa, miten ne ovat synnyttäneet, vahvistaneet ja ylläpitäneet yhteiskunnallisiin, poliittisiin ja sosiaalisiin rajoihin liittyviä käsityksiä. Lisäksi artikkelissa kiinnitetään huomiota siihen, miten käsite vernakulaari ja sen tark...

Newspapers Newspapers collect information about social, cultural and political events in a more detailed way than any other public record from the past. Advertisements are an especially interesting section in which readers are being persuaded to buy or sell something. As such ads reflect the needs of a society in miniature form. Studying the linguistic features of persuasive language in ads helps us understand long-term processes that relate to such needs. In the case of marketing pills and other medical artefacts, we can study aspects of nineteenth-century medicalization and the gendered marketing of health products. Research Questions How do indicators of persuasive language appear in advertisements? What linguistic strategies were used for persuading people into buying or using? Which patterns arise when examining medical advertisements through the prism of gender? The quality of the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is an important metric for the evaluation of the reliability of our data. From 1800 to 1899 only a small portion of articles of type "News" or "Classified Ads" contains information about the OCR quality. For the articles that include OCR confidence levels the mean OCR quality per year lies in the range 65%-87%. British Newspaper Data We use digitized material from the British Library Nineteenth Century Newspaper Collection (Gale Cengage). Our data consists of: unique newspaper identifiers different publication locations newspaper issues articles advertisements 304 91 270.744 26.295.841 1.560.916