Edda (Mar 2024)

Mars Destroys, Love Mends<subtitle>Wedding Poetry During the Great Northern War</subtitle>

  • Eeva-Liisa Bastman

DOI
https://doi.org/10.18261/edda.111.1.2
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 111, no. 1
pp. 3 – 21

Abstract

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Wedding poetry was an important genre in early modern literature and a way to congratulate and praise a newlywed couple on their wedding day. During the first decades of the eighteenth century, war emerged as a central topic of wedding poems in the kingdom of Sweden. By applying the concept of repertory poetry, referring to poetry as a system based on the circulation of literary material, I examine how the war was discussed in wedding poems and how poems articulate common understandings and personal experiences of war, military occupation, and life as a refugee.

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