Village gossip or voice of the people? The culture of letters to the press in the grasp of transnational ideologies in mid-1800s Finland

Abstract: A nationwide culture of readers' letters to newspapers developed in Finland during the first phase of modernization from the 1850s onwards. A characteristic of this culture was that the letters were written in the name of local communities. In the tens of thousands of "local letters" to newspapers, thousands of ordinary people documented their everyday experiences of the societal transformation. However, the culture was largely ignored and underrated by the Finnish-language journalists of the era who were also members of the nationalistic elite. The vernacular character of the culture was contradictory to the new transnational ideologies of nationalism, which emphasized the forms of cultural life that were considered to represent higher culture, such as prose fiction, poetry, and theatre. The chapter opens a new perspective to the transnationality of nationalism and the ideological struggle regarding it in the nineteenth century press.

Keywords: nationalism, newspapers, letters to the press, translocal, 19th century