Nineteenth Century
Since the Middle Ages Finnish has been rich in folklore. Hundreds of old folk poems, stories and their like have been collected since the 1820s into a collection that might be the largest in the world. Many of these have since been published as The Ancient Poems of the Finnish People. It is a colossal collection consisting of 27,000 pages in 33 volumes. The morphology of stories was first prepared by Antti Aarne (Aarne-Thompson, The Types of the Folk Tale), used widely in e.g. the United States until recent times.
The most famous collection of folk poetry is by far the Kalevala. Referred to as the Finnish "national epic" it is mainly credited to Elias Lönnrot who compiled the volume. It was first published in 1835 and quickly became a symbol of Finnish nationalism. Finland was then politically controlled by Russia and had previously been part of Sweden. The Kalevala was therefore an important part of early Finnish identity. Beside the collection of lyric poems Kanteletar it has been and still is a major influence in art and music, like Jean Sibelius. It is a common misconception that Lönnrot merely "collected" pre-existing poetry. It is now widely accepted that the Kalevala represents an amalgam of loosely connected source materials, freely altered by Lönnrot to present the appearance of a unified whole.
See History of Finland.
Essentially the first novel published in Finnish was Seven Brothers (1870) by Aleksis Kivi (1834—1872), still generally considered to be one of the greatest of all works of Finnish literature. As in Europe and the United States, the popularity of the novel in Finland is connected to industrialisation with many of the first Finnish novels dealing with the life of the modern middle-class or the clash of the traditional peasants with e.g. railway. In the case of Seven Brothers specifically, the theme is how uneducated residents of the countryside can survive in the developing urban civilisation and authority - a common theme in Finnish novels.
Read more about this topic: Finnish Literature
Famous quotes related to nineteenth century:
“The taste for freedom, the fashion and cult of happiness of the majority, that the nineteenth century is infatuated with was only a heresy in his eyes that would pass like others.”
—Stendhal [Marie Henri Beyle] (1783–1842)
“The nineteenth century was completely lacking in logic, it had cosmic terms and hopes, and aspirations, and discoveries, and ideals but it had no logic.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Why does he not know how to select servants? The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.”
—Stendhal [Marie Henri Beyle] (1783–1842)
“Posterity—the forlorn child of nineteenth century optimism—grows ever harder to conceive.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist’s couch.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)