Women's Voices: Female Authors and Feminist Criticism in the Finnish Literary Tradition

Finnish women writers from the nineteenth century onwards have dealt with various problems concerning women's daily lives, their rights, their identities and their own voice. And these same questions can still be heard in contemporary women's literature. The articles in "Women's Voices" survey some of the ways in which Finnish female authors from the 1840s to the 1990s have dealt with these questions, and the solutions to these problems they have envisioned in their writing. How has the idea of freedom changed? What has been the relationship between female authors and the women's movement? What happens when female authors gradually become aware of the multiplicity of their identity? How do different literary genres affect the way women write? These are some of the questions focused on in Women's Voices. At the same time the volume presents an overview of the range of approaches to feminist criticism drawn on by Finnish feminist scholars.