Literary Studies

Researchers in literary studies carry out research on a variety of historical and contemporary topics. Our key theoretical starting points are in narrative studies, the research of genres and affects, ecocriticism, and urban humanities. Our researchers are active in a number of international networks, and several of their research projects apply multidisciplinary approaches. We have a large and lively group of doctoral candidates, with a research seminar that is active all year round.

Literary studies is home to the international multidisciplinary centre Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies, which focuses on the study of narrative form and on the role of narrative in society. The research centre collaborates with other leading research centres in Europe and the United States. Narrare conducts joint research projects, publishes cutting-edge research, organises researcher exchanges, conferences and symposia, and provides interdisciplinary doctoral training. Narrare also collaborates with various communities and professional groups outside the university. 

Literary studies researchers are also involved in the organisation of such multidisciplinary research networks as the Association for Literary Urban Studies (Lieven Ameel). The degree programme also organises an annual autumn seminar, where students and researchers popularise literary studies for the general public.

The Degree Programme in Literary Studies and the Narrare centre are conducting the following research projects:

Political Temporalities. Narrating Continuity and Change in the Finnish Parliament from the Cold War to Covid-19 (POLTE), led by Mari Hatavara, studies the uses of political temporalities in the Finnish Parliament from 1976 until today, a period commonly viewed as witnessing a major transformation in culture, politics and society. We focus on how narratives organize events and explain and predict motivations to drive political action. Storytelling is a powerful means to construe temporal sequences that justify the speaker’s point of view, as narratives organize time into storylines of continuity and change. Conventional narratives of historical change as a basis for continuity have today lost their explanatory power in the face of unexpected global phenomena and the fragmentation of political ideologies. Outside of the conventional and the paradigmatic, narrative as a sense making operation helps us organize time with the sequential and causal logic of stories.

The Historical Poetics of Finnish Literature (2022–2027), led by Saija Isomaa, brings together researchers from Tampere University and the University of Helsinki in order to write a new history of Finnish Literature. The project is funded by Kone Foundation.

Authors of the Story Economy: Narrative and Digital Capital in the 21st-Century Literary Field (AUTOSTORY, 2024–2028) consortium, led by Maria Mäkelä, harnesses narrative theory and literary sociology to analyse authors’ narrative rhetoric in the 21st-century story economy. The contemporary dominance of personal storytelling across platforms crucially affects all actors in the literary field as it foregrounds the author’s bodily and social habitus, moral positioning and ethos, experiential knowledge, and public identity work. AUTOSTORY provides actors in the literary field – from researchers to journalists, publishers, audiences, and the authors themselves – with critical insight on how social media driven publicity affects literary expression and contributes to the loss of autonomy of the literary field. https://autostoryproject.wordpress.com/

Sari Kivistö's Academy Professor project The Verses of Learning: Epideixis and the Cultural Stories of Nature at Early Modern Universities (VERSITAS) examines the significance of poetry and rhetoric in the history of the natural sciences at early modern universities. Myths and cultural narratives formed an important part of early modern scientific writing and experiences of nature. Understanding nature from a cultural perspective requires attention to the literary forms, genres, and rhetorical strategies through which it was depicted. In this project, scientific literature is approached specifically as literature, with its historically evolving modes of expression. The project is funded by the Research Council of Finland, 2026-2031.

Sari Kivistö is the PI of the consortium research project "Suffering and Meliorism in Literature and the Philosophy of Literature" within the RCF Centre of Excellence on Meliorist Philosophy of Suffering(MePhiS, 2026–2033). The research group investigates literature and the philosophy of literature as routes toward a meliorist philosophy of suffering. With a strong literary–philosophical orientation, we take seriously the idea that literary works can articulate philosophical and ethical issues and shape how people experience, express, and manage suffering. The project is funded by the Research Council of Finland, 2026-2033.

Literary extinction: lost literary genres and imagining the past, led by Sari Kivistö, examines disappearance as a literary historical phenomenon. The project aims to combat literary extinction and the impoverishment of literary genres by drawing attention to small historically lost genres. The goal is to enrich the understanding of the historical and local diversity of literary genres; to create new ways of analyzing literary history and its changes  through the trope of disappearance; and explore how the trope of loss creates space for imaginative and creative ways of filling in the gaps of history and reimagining history. The project is funded by the Kone Foundation, 2023-2026.

Previous research projects include the following:

Voices of Democracy: The Will of the People by the People and by Their Representatives (VODE), led by Matti Hyvärinen, is an Academy of Finland-funded research project (2017–2021). The Voices of Democracy project is exploring the way people’s representatives and the nation have conceptualised and debated democracy in different contexts. The analysis of extensive textual data – including stories, speeches and parlance – is providing a comprehensive understanding of the ways by which the nation and people’s representatives understand, share and discuss the nature and development of democracy in Finland over the past decades. The project connects scholars from politics, history, literary studies, and sociology with data processing experts. The aim is to understand the narrative and discursive means of speaking about politics, which produce both political contents and one’s own and others’ actions. The project is testing and developing statistical and grammatical methods of data processing and combining them with multidisciplinary narrative research in order to develop better quantitative and qualitative analyses in the study of large textual data.

The Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New Story-Critical Narrative Theory (2018-2022) consortium, led by Maria Mäkelä, is an umbrella for projects at Tampere University and the Universities of Turku and Helsinki. The consortium is developing ideas and analytical instruments that will equip researchers, professional groups and non-academic audiences with skills to navigate contemporary social and textual environments that are dominated by storytelling. The project puts contemporary literary fiction in dialogue with the manipulative stories that spread around the internet in order to reveal the dubious relationship that some narratives have with identity, truth, politics, and complex systems such as climate change. The project uses narrative theory to develop new approaches to the dark side of storytelling that are suitable for different disciplines and for non-academic debates. In this work, the project takes advantage of story-critical themes and techniques offered by works of contemporary literature.

Maria Mäkelä, Samuli Pekkola and Jari Stenvall lead the Tarinat tietotekniikan toteutuksessa project (2019–2022) (Stories in the implementation of information technology, INFOSTORY) which is taking a critical look at narratives as part of the development of information systems and applying narrative methods to develop information systems and the management of organisations. The project is funded by the Emil Aaltonen Foundation.                                                  

Anna Ovaska’s Reading Experiences of Pain: Enactive and Critical Perspectives on Suffering in Narrative Fiction (2020-2023) project explores the interaction between literary texts and readers from the perspective of narrative representations of physical and emotional pain and trauma. The aim is to develop an embodied and situated theory of reading and text-to-reader interaction, as well as new critical and socially conscious practices of close reading with the help of theories of the enactive philosophy of mind, the phenomenology of reading and neo-formalism. The project is funded by the Kone Foundation.

Hanna Roine’s Academy of Finland-funded postdoctoral fellow project CO-SPEC, Drawing the Possible into the Present: Entanglements of Human and Computer in Speculation (CO-SPEC, 2020–2024) started at Narrare in the autumn of 2020.

The Arctic hysteria – strange Northern emotions project led by Riikka Rossi explores affects and emotions in narratives about Finland as part of the North, and investigates the cultural mentality created by these narratives. The focus is on negative and ambivalent emotions described in and triggered by imaginaries of the North and the Finnish North which are studied with the help of multidisciplinary research on affects. The project is funded by the Kone Foundation (2020-2022).