ABOUT BOOK

"The poem Kalevipoeg, over 19,000 lines in length, was composed by Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803–1882) on the basis on folklore material. It was published in an Estonian-German bilingual edition in six instalments between 1857 and 1861; it went on to become the Estonian national epic. This first English-language monograph on the Kalevipoeg sheds light on ~various aspects of the emergence, creation and reception of the text. ~The first chapter sketches the objectives of the book and gives a short ~summary of the contents of the twenty tales of the epic, while the second ~chapter treats the significance of the epic against the cultural background of ~nineteenth-century Estonia. ~The third chapter scrutinizes the emergence of the text in more ~detail and, in its second part, takes a closer look at the many intertextual ~connections and the traces the epic material has left in Estonian literature ~up to the present time. The fourth chapter is a detailed case study of one ~debated passage of the fifteenth tale. ~The fifth and the six chapters deal with the German reception of the epic, ~which partly took place earlier than the reception in Estonia. In the fifth ~chapter, the first reviews and an early treatise by the German scholar Wilhelm Schott (1863) are discussed. The sixth chapter presents the new genre of ‘rewritings’ of the epic – texts which cannot be labelled as translations but are rather new creations on the basis of Kreutzwald’s text. ~In the seventh chapter several versions of these retellings and adaptations ~are compared in order to show the stability of some core material conveyed ~by various authors. A concluding chapter stresses the significance of foreign ~reception in the canonization process of the Kalevipoeg. At the end, a ~comprehensive bibliography and an index are added."