9. Lieven Ameel Helsinki_TMBTP

Urban Broadcast Collective

Lieven Ameel of the University of Tampere (Finland) on the literary unease of urban life by This Must be The Place This episode of This Must Be the Place features an interview by David (a self-confessed Finnophile) with Lieven Ameel at the University of Tampere in Finland, when David was a visiting scholar. They discuss Lieven’s book about literary representations of urban life in Helsinki in Early 20th Century Finnish Literature ("Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Literature: Urban Experiences in Finnish Prose Fiction 1890-1940" blogs.helsinki.fi/urbannarratives/publications/). Finish literature from the early 20th century tends to have been threaded through with unease about urban life – lots of farm girls getting exploited etc., perhaps because “it’s so easy to use a city is a metaphor or allegory of the human capacity for good and evil”. Apparently there was a rich body of urban literature from Finland, but this has largely been forgotten and not translated – even works by authors whose rural-based work is better known. In Finland, seemingly universal anxieties about cities and change were amplified by the fears of a newly formed country that defined itself in rural terms. Also, if you listen right to the end there’s us discussing Fawkner cemetery, Beechworth asylum, unmarked graves at Sunbury asylum, and more. Note - in the podcast we wonder aloud - when did cremation become legal in Victoria? The answer seems to be: 1903.