Values of Literature

Why we read literature and why we should read literature are age-old questions that have, in recent years, gained unprecedented scope and intensity, against the backdrop of what has been perceived as a world-wide crisis in the humanities. While scholars frequently discuss different types of value separately, in this volume values of literature are approached in the plural: we argue that the ethical, aesthetic, cognitive, affective, social, historical, and existential values of literature should be explored in connection with each other. The three parts of the book explore the relationship between ethics and aesthetics; the cognitive, affective, and social values of literature; and the construction and questioning of literary values in society. Throughout the book, we discuss the different things literature can do – ranging from affirmation of social dogmas to its capacities for self-questioning and challenging of moral certainties – through the dynamic interplay of its ethical and aesthetic, cognitive and affective aspects. Literature not only reflects and draws on the values of the historical world from which it stems; it also actively addresses, challenges, and transforms those values and explores new ways to understand value. Through these complementary processes, literature engages in its own distinctively literary forms of value inquiry.

Hanna Meretoja is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies at the University of Tampere (Finland), Adjunct Professor and Research Fellow at the University of Turku (Finland) and the leader of the research project "Ethics of Storytelling and the Experience of History in Contemporary Arts" (Emil Aaltonen Foundation, 2013-15). Her most recent publications include The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and “Narrative and Human Existence: Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics” (New Literary History, 45:1, 2014).

Saija Isomaa is University Lecturer in Finnish Literature at the University of Tampere. She has co-edited two edited volumes in English and two in Finnish, and she has edited the first issue of the new peer-reviewed Finnish literary journal entitled “Joutsen / Svanen.” Her current research focuses on the affective and persuasive aspects of literary genres and the migration of genres across time, place, and cultural borders.

Pirjo Lyytikäinen is Professor of Finnish literature and director of the research community Genres of Literary Worldmaking at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Lyytikäinen’s publications include several monographs in Finnish and numerous articles in English. She has edited and co-edited the following anthologies in English: Imagining Spaces and Places (2013) Rethinking Mimesis (2012), Genre and Interpretation (2010), The Angel of History: Literature, History and Culture (2009) and Changing Scenes: Encounters between European and Finnish Fin de Siècle (2003).

Kristina Malmio is Adjunct Professor in Nordic Literature at University of Helsinki, Finland, and the research leader of a research project “Late Modern Spatiality in Finland-Swedish Prose Literature 1990–2010” (Swedish Society of Literature in Finland, 2014–2016). Malmio has authored two monographs in Swedish and has edited and co-edited several books on Finland-Swedish literature, the peer-reviewed Avain – Finnish Journal of Literary Studies and a forthcoming anthology in English on Finland-Swedish literature.