Toward a Historical Poetics of the Kalevala : Methods and Approaches of Literary Studies

This article presents a text-analytical literary studies perspective on the Kalevala, exploring how it, and works like it, may be interpreted as a literary work through the lens of historical poetics. The development of historical poetics within international and Finnish research on poetics is surveyed with attention to contextual, diachronic, and diachronic-contextual orientations. Past and potential applications of these orientations to the Kalevala are presented. Particular attention is paid to genre theory. Literary theories of adaptation are used to suggest that the Kalevala can be seen as a literary adaptation of previous oral poetry, a transmedial transition from an oral to a literary medium, with attendant changes of genre and audience. Within this framework, Lönnrot's three versions of the Kalevala are understood as distinct adaptations—both of vernacular oral poetry and, to varying degrees, of one another.