Finnish Folk Poetry and the Kalevala (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780815319757)

Since its initial publication in the early nineteenth century, Elias Lonnrot's Finnish epic Kalevala has attracted international interest and scholarship. However, the author comments that the distorting lenses of translation, cultural difference and historical distance, have rendered the work a cryptic and often misinterpreted text outside of its country of origin. Even within Finland, scholars have found it difficult at times to judge the relation of the Kalevala to its oral sources. Lonnrot's meticulous notes and discussions of intent and accomplishment make clear what he changed and how he went about it, but give us less inkling of why. This study's view is that the key to understanding Lonnrot's changes lies in Romantic aesthetics and in the intellectual and socio-political agendas which they encode. Lonnrot created a Romantic epic out of Baltic-Finnic folk poetry, an epic complete with the narrative, generic, gendered and political characteristics of literary epics in nineteenth century' Europe.

Author: Thomas A. DuBois
ISBN-10: 0815319754
ISBN-13: 9780815319757
Publisher: Routledge
Language: English
Published: 10/01/1995
Pages: 344
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.20lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.81d