Suomalaiset sivulliset : Eksistentiaalisten tunteiden kertominen 1950-luvun proosassa / Elise Nykänen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nykänen, Elise, author.

Language:

Finnish

Subjects (All):

Existentialism in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (332 pages)

Other Title:

Suomalaiset sivulliset

Place of Publication:

Helsinki : Finnish Literature Society / SKS, 2022.

Summary:

This study explores the narration of existential feelings, or feelings of being in the world, in post-war Finnish prose fiction. The book presents five case studies which address modern individuals' struggles in boundary situations of their lives. Rigorous readings of the works of Kerttu-Kaarina Suosalmi, Lassi Nummi, Marko Tapio, Tyyne Saastamoinen and Eeva-Liisa Manner all show the influence of French existentialism and its predecessors on post-war Finnish modernism for the first time in literary studies. The outsider figures and their experiences of the absurd, which have enticed the cultural imagination since ancient cults and the Book of Job, connect to the atmosphere of shared melancholy in post-war Finnish culture and society. The study participates in the rich contemporary debates on the effects of literature by focusing on less-discussed aspects of bodily feeling, affect, emotion and mood in late Finnish modernism. The book's methodological contribution to narrative theory is that it combines a phenomenological analysis of reading with a rhetorical theory of narrative and politically informed, multidisciplinary emotion studies. The five case studies show how modernist outsider prose fiction in Finland resorts to irony, metafiction, allegory and the imaginative to generate ethically challenging narrative tension and an ambivalence of negative and positive emotion in readers. The opposing impulses of the aesthetic response produce an openness of interpretation. This openness provides us with the possibility of a more complex cultural understanding of emotion and ethics in the lives of strangers within literature and outside it.

Contents:

Kiitokset

7

I Näkökulmia sivullisuuteen

10

KerttuKaarina Suosalmen Synti

65

Aggression tutkielma Lassi Nummen tapaan

109

IV Marko Tapio ja taakankantajan danse macabre

150

Tyyne Saastamoisen Vanha portti metafyysisenä romaanina

191

EevaLiisa Manner ja paluu lapsuuteen

240

Suomalaiset sivulliset

295

Lyhenteet

305

Lähteet

306

Abstract

324

Asiahakemisto

325

Copyright.

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (Finnish Literature Society / SKS, viewed May 17, 2023).