About us

The aim of our project Figuring Nature in the North. How Contemporary Finnish Literature Makes Sense of Environmental Emergency (Pohjoista luontoa kuvittelemassa. Kirjallisuus ja kulttuurinen muutos ekologisen kriisin aikakaudella) is to understand how in a particular northern territory, delineated by the borders of the state of Finland, the world is imagined and explained in literary fiction at this moment of crisis. The project is situated between global theories of the Anthropocene and the environmental change, and the very specific cultural context of literature produced in a language spoken by five million people mostly residing on a smallish boreal area.

Our main focus is on analyzing contemporary fiction, as we track the ways literature navigates the current environmental and cultural crisis. To be able to identify features emerging from current conditions particularly, we have chosen for comparison another corpus of fiction, written in a significantly different context: Finland of 1950s and 60s, the decades of industrial development and global acceleration of population growth – documents from the beginning of the Anthropocene. The two corpora emerge from very different historical conjunctures with remarkable differences in the ways the society is organized in terms of ecology, economics, and ideologies. Alongside these two runs a third corpus that consists of research, reportages, pamphlets and other non-fiction documenting the environmental change.

Is literary nature still depicted in line with the romantic conception as a sublime power whose vastness justifies the human battle against it, or does the story of man still begin with the draining of swamp – as in Väinö Linna’s classic Under the North Star (1959)? Or are we finding new ways of talking about the environment, and if so, what are these new ways like?

We study the changing Northern imagery by following seven literary figures as they move across time and different narrative contexts. We concentrate on snow, the forest, the ruin, the human child (human animal), the dog (domesticated companion animal), the broiler chicken (production animal), and the boreal bird (wild animal). We understand these figures as topological (as building on literary conventions), as representative (as having a relationship(s) to extra-literary referent(s)), and as performative (as having consequences), but not tied to just one of these logics.

The team concists of eight researchers: Katri Aholainen, Marianna Koljonen, Karoliina Lummaa, Kukku Melkas, Jouni Teittinen, Ate Tervonen ja Helinä Ääri. The project is lead by Elsi Hyttinen. Our work is supported by an advisory board consisting of four distinguished experts on their field: Professor Sanna Karkulehto (University of Jyväskylä, Finland), Professor Ann-Sofie Lönngren (Södertörn University, Sweden), Assistant Professor Marietta Radomska (Linköping University, Sweden), Adjunct Professor Mia Österlund (Åbo Akademi, Finland).