Geographic Space in Pentti Haanpää’s Novel Korpisotaa

Abstract

Pentti Haanpää (1905-1955) was one of the most important Finnish authors in the first half of the 20th century. His short stories and novels describe life in the north-western part of the Finnish countryside many times, but his collected works also include many other themes. Among his works are five books, three novels, and two short story collections, which describe either military life or war. His first war novel, Korpisotaa describes the Finnish Winter War of 1939–40. Haanpää wrote the novel based loosely on his own war experiences for a competition for the best winter war novel arranged in 1940 by Prentice-Hall together with the Finnish publisher Otava; the novel was ranked third best in the competition. The novel is generally considered the first realistic war novel published in Finland [1-3], and its reception was favorable in general [4]. In this study, we focus on the analysis of geographic space in Korpisotaa. We use a digital version of the novel to be able to easily search for all the relevant space and location words in the novel. The methods we use in the study are familiar from linguistic corpus studies, and they have been used to some extent in literary studies as well. Besides common methods like keyness and frequency counts, we can benefit from a lexical semantic tagger of Finnish. Usage of the tagger systematizes the finding of the geographic space words in the novel and the comparison texts and enables us to perform keyness counts for semantic word groups instead of single words. Our work contributes especially to the use of digital methods in literary analysis and the creation of literary study corpora. Even for a novel-length, the availability of a digital version of the studied text helps detailed analysis very much, as will be shown in the analysis of Korpisotaa.