Preliminary Programme

A sense of loss is a driving force in most nationalist movements. In nineteenth century Scandinavia, territorial losses as a result of the wars at the beginning of the century sparked off nationalism in Denmark and Sweden. However, the ceded territories, lost from the former empires’ point-of-view, constituted the new borders of Norway and Finland. Nevertheless, the Norwegian and Finnish nationalist movements also used loss as a powerful trope. By the mid-nineteenth century, the issue of a lost language, and in the Norwegian case the idea of a lost, Medieval Golden Age, had become defining features of the construction of nationhood in Finland and Norway respectively. These ideas of loss were heavily charged with different emotions – grief, nostalgia, anger – often changing over time. Literature was essential for the spread of nationalism, not in the least for establishing and circulating emotions promoting a nationalist agenda in nineteenth-century public debate. In this paper I will examine the emotional construction of the sense of loss in Scandinavian literature, more specifically, grief as nationalism. Grief over the Norwegian mountains in poetry by the Danish N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783–1872), and grief over Finland and the Finnish people in Swedish literature, such as Esaias Tegnér’s poem “Svea” (1811) and novels of the 1840s by Fredrika Bremer (1801–1865) and G.H. Mellin (1803–1876), will be compared to grief over language in mid-nineteenth-century Finnish literature by Zacharias Topelius (1818–1898) and Sara Wacklin (1790–1846). In the Norwegian national poet J. S. Welhaven’s “Billeder fra Bergenskysten” (“Pictures from the coast of Bergen”, 1842), the cultural remnants of the lost Medieval, independent kingdom, are found in a forgotten area. Literature provides a fruitful source for exploring the temporal aspect of loss and the emotional structure of grief motivating nationalism. (Show less)

The paper explores emotional, personal and social resources and motivations of nation-building, especially in connection with national agency and self-construction. The themes are analysed through the correspondence of a family network, who was central in the Finnish mid-nineteenth century nationalism. The family, the Tengströms, brought together a group of culturally, socially and educationally active people, both women and men, in siblinghood, friendships and marriages. By reading the letters as experiential narrations and combining group biographical data, I argue that the construction of nationalism and close relationships were emotionally tightly intertwined. In more general terms, I propose that personal and emotional meanings of nationalism should be taken into account in order to better understand the emergence of national belonging and agency.

The family formed an ideological-emotional environment where the nationalistic ideas could be nurtured productively. In the marriages, the shared nationalistic commitment helped overcome social discrepancies and was even a prerequisite for the mutual feelings. The close relationships enabled and motivated concrete nationalistic activities, like publications and charities. Importantly, the construction of nationalism in emotional relationships was closely linked to (gendered) self-construction as well. Nationalistic cause gave a sense of meaning and purpose in life. Married couples framed their mutual feelings in national terms. Their shared, nationalistic aims were concretised in the men’s careers and in the education of the children. The emotional friendships between young men gave them latitude to reach towards their adult manhood and their assumed role as the future leaders of the national movement. Also, siblinghood offered space for self-construction where the brother had loving but somewhat patronizing tone towards his sisters and where the sisters among themselves drew the lines of proper national womanhood while feeling the pressure of these demands. The analysis proves that the mutual emotions affected and inspired the nationalistic activities and self-construction, and vice versa, the nationalistic commitment created and strengthened the emotional ties. (Show less)

With the gradual radicalization of Finnish linguistic nationalism in the 19th-century Grand Duchy of Finland, the Swedish-speaking minority was increasingly portrayed as the Other, a foreign, non-national element that did not truly belong to the Finnish nation. This criticism was particularly targeted at the privileged aristocratic upper classes that occupied the top civil servant posts at the Senate, i.e. the local government that was the highest authority in the central administration of the Grand Duchy.

This paper focuses on the group of Swedish-speaking young intellectuals of aristocratic descent, above all, the cultural radical philosopher Rolf Lagerborg (1874–1959), who strongly experienced the ambivalence about national belonging and reflected highly mixed feelings and contradictory ideas about his native country. On the one hand, Lagerborg had been brought up in the spirit of bureaucratic-patriotism and old military traditions. His upbringing highlighted loyalism towards the Grand Duchy and the crucial role of the elite in improving the country. On the other hand, however, in the midst of the intensifying Finnification politics, he simultaneously felt like a complete outsider, describing his feelings about Finland as “the prisoner’s feelings towards his prison,” and was ashamed of his “primitive” emotional attachment to the country.

The paper suggests that this conflict or oscillation between a striving for intense, close devotion and a distancing, critical reflexivity can be related to Georges Bataille and Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject. From this perspective, the nation can be seen as an ambiguous border zone between the “me” and the “not-me,” and thus as something that the subject (in this case, Lagerborg) sought to expel in order to achieve an independent identity. Yet, as indicative of a spatially and historically situated, emotionally laden, and embodied relationship, the “abjective” nation was not something one could get easily rid of. (Show less)

This paper uses a corpus of ego-documents, mainly memoirs, journals and travel books written by British, French and Spanish individuals during the Age of Revolutions (c. 1780-1840), in order to explore the intersection between history of emotions and history of nationalism. It tackles an essential period of the history of nationalism, shaped by the rise of national sovereignty and the consolidation of the modern idea of “individual”. Overall, half of the subjects belong to the intellectual, political and/or economical elites, but the other half are from a background that could be labelled as medium or lower class.

The paper examines the meanings and contexts of the word “nation” and other kindred terms, and undercovers how they are shaped in emotional terms. 18th century national stereotypes were expressed as moral sentiments. The political intensification brought about by the Age of Revolutions has a corollary both in nationalist outbursts (Napoleonic Wars, Spanish War of Independence) and much more radical emotional regimes (piercing shame, exaggerated love, deep contempt).

Looking at the way those individuals talk about their nation and drawing on the work of Jan Plamper, Barbara Rosenwein and William Reddy, I consider how the realm of emotions is essential for nationalization, and how different conceptions about them (emotions as the product of external processes happening in the individual, emotions as atmospheres that seize the individual) interact with different nationalist contents (solidarity, treachery, civilization and barbarism, liberty and equality, etc).

Drawing on this empirical evidence, I argue that the Age of Revolutions was a nationalising moment for its participants and that emotions and nationhood established a reciprocal self-reinforcing relation in that context. However, national bonds should not be construed exclusively “as emotions”. Every national identity implies a feeling of community, but nations are much more complex phenomena than mere communities of feeling (Show less)