Literary Minds in Early Finnish Prose Literature

This article focuses on the representations of literary minds in early examples of Finnish language prose. We use the speech category approach to divide the representations into three types: psycho-narration, direct discourse, and free indirect discourse. Our method is linguistically and narratologically oriented, which provides a novel approach to the study of the early Finnish prose literature. The results demonstrate that fictional minds have been represented with diverse techniques since the beginning of Finnish prose, and these techniques have varying narrative functions from creating emotional effects to building suspense. Even though consciousness representation does not abound in the early examples of Finnish prose, these representations offer valuable insights into the narrative dynamics of the works studied in this article.Peer reviewe