Kirjandus(aja)looline Eesti
Literary Estonia ­ History and Story

Summary/Abstract: 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.

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