Docent Anna Kuismin (Univ. of Helsinki) will give a public lecture.

In her talk, Kuismin discuss about representations of popular amusements in Finnish newspapers, periodicals and fiction from the 1870s to the 1910s. The entertainers include sellers of broadside ballads, whose trade was predominantly in the hands of Finnish-speaking men, while barrel organ grinders who also sold “cards of luck” came from other ethnic backgrounds. The focus is on depictions of sellers of songs and on the ways they were seen by people who bought their commodities. The period has been called ‘the golden age of broadside ballads’, during which the culture of creating, selling and consuming (singing, reading) these texts belonged to the unschooled common people, while the educated writers repeatedly attacked these activities.