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Discourses of Modernity

The Case of Estonian Literature

by Piret Peiker

“Discourses of Modernity tells a compelling and long overdue story of the ways in which Estonian modernities, its nation — and state-building have been narrated and presented, but also constructed and reconstructed, by its major literary figures. Extending from the emergence of the national identity in the nineteenth century to the post-Soviet transition period, the book not only fleshes out the shaping of key modern ideas and imageries, such as freedom, change and History, in literature, but also places these in their broader historical and political contexts. While a major contribution to Estonian and Baltic intellectual history, Discourses of Modernity also integrates these into the wider European history of literary, cultural and political ideas.”

— Liisi Keedus, Professor of Political Philosophy, Institute of Humanities, Tallinn University

Piret Peiker is a postdoctoral researcher at the European Research Council financed project in intellectual history Between the Times: Embattled Temporalities and Political Imagination in inter-War Europe, based at Tallinn University, Estonia. She received her doctoral degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Turku, Finland. Prior to her present position she served as the head of the Juri Lotman Semiotics Repository (the archive and library of the semioticians Juri Lotman and Zara Mints) at Tallinn University, simultaneously teaching courses related to cultural theory, studies of nationhood, and postcolonial studies there. She has also been teaching and doing research at the Estonian Institute of Humanities, Tallinn; the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London; University of Copenhagen; University of Latvia, Riga; Institute of Advanced Studies, Kőszeg. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on the topics of nationhood, modernity, postcolonialism, entangled history, techniques of translating historical fiction and their impact on political imagination.