A.H. Tammsaare’s Truth and Justice as a Postcolonial Bildungsroman

Piret Peiker

Journal of Baltic Studies, 2015, vol. 46, issue 2, 199-216

Abstract: A.H. Tammsaare’s pentalogy Truth and Justice is considered a central text in Estonian culture, perceived virtually as a second national epic. The article analyzes it from the perspective of comparative genre studies. It is discussed as an idiosyncratic example of Bildungsroman, a genre narrativizing modernizing change focusing on the lives of everyday individuals, thus symbolically domesticating and humanizing the global developments of modernization. The emplotment of Tammsaare’s novel is comparatively discussed against the background of the Western European Bildungsroman on the one hand and of non-European postcolonial Bildungsroman on the other. The analysis enables to gain new insight into the reception and cultural working-through of the belated rapid modernization in Estonia. It also helps to explain the canonical position of Tammsaare’s novel in Estonian literature: The novel is a poetic tour de force that forges a both intra- and internationally acceptable model of modern Estonia.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01629778.2015.1009132 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rbalxx:v:46:y:2015:i:2:p:199-216

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rbal20

DOI: 10.1080/01629778.2015.1009132

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Baltic Studies is currently edited by Liisi Esse

More articles in Journal of Baltic Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().