Happy to announce that my book Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Literature (2014) is being re-published as a handsome open-access publication, available here.

It is still the only scholarly monograph that examines experiences of Helsinki in Finnish-written literature.

Ameel, Lieven 2014: Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Literature. Urban Experiences in Finnish Prose Fiction 1890-1940. Helsinki: SKS. 241 pages.

http://oa.finlit.fi/site/books/detail/5/helsinki-in-early-twentieth-century-literature/

Reviews of Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Literature (2014):

“… it is a great merit of Ameel’s study that it shows how Finnish prose is a part of the modern Nordic and European literature of the metropolis, without omitting its characteristic traits. The reader gets a broad insight into a multi-layered and intriguing thematic. Ameel’s book will surely be a starting point for much new research.” (Judith Meurer-Bongardt in Finsk Tidskrift 2015/3-4)

“Ameel combines methods from different research traditions and builds a complex picture of Helsinki’s literature in the early 20th century. He draws, amongst others, on urban studies, urban literary studies and genre studies. This multidisciplinary approach could also be used to examine other literary cities, and Ameel’s work inspires to investigate how, for example, Tampere, Oulu and Kuopio are rendered in literature, or how descriptions of Helsinki in the late twentieth and twenty-first century differ from earlier ones. One of the merits of the study is its stylistic and linguistic clarity and subtlety, which is why this study will hopefully find readers also from outside literary research. “(Hanna Samola in Avain 2015/2)

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