| 2007 |
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Linda Kaljundi. Literary Estonia History and Story |
2007, nr. 12 |
The article discusses the tradition of writing
the history of Estonian literature and, from the point of view
of a historian, aims at offering some new perspectives regarding
both re-conceptualising the role of literary history and the broadening
of its territories. While the discourse and function of the traditional
history of literature has been problematised widely during the
last decades, making the question "is literary history possible?"
almost inevitable, in the 1990s in Estonia the regaining of independence
and de-sovietisation rather strengthened the rewriting of traditional
national history as well as cultural history. In this discourse,
established during the birth of the Estonian nation in the late
19th century, the Estonian literary history is considered as solely
the history of literature written in Estonian. While there has
been a new rise of interest in the modern Baltic-German literature,
the Latin and low-German literary culture of the medieval and
early modern period has been left out of the literary histories
at its own right. Among others, the postcolonial perspective could
bring some fruitful insights into the material (e.g. the cultural
colonisation in the Middle Ages, or the development of the local
elite identity through creating an image of the indigenous low
class as the other), as well as into its use and abuse in the
modern period. Differently form this forgotten culture of the
"alien elite" the canon of Estonian literature has encompassed
the religious and popular writings in Estonian from the 16th century
onwards. Yet, next to being considered as the immanent prehistory
of the Estonian literature, these psalms, newspapers, adaptations
of pious and didactic novels, etc. could rather offer magnificent
source material for studies from the perspective of cultural history
and anthropology. And last but not least, the studies of the history
of Estonian literature as a part of cultural memory and a realm
of memory could also offer a fresh perspective on the discipline,
especially considering the heavy dependence of Estonian historical
consciousness on fiction.
Keywords: history of Estonian literature,
literary history, cultural history, historical memory.
Linda Kaljundi (b. 1979), PhD student, University
of Helsinki, University of Tartu; coordinator, Centre for Medieval
Studies, Tallinn University
linda.kaljundi@helsinki.fi
| 2007 |
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