Chasing writers’ ghosts through a modern city : Augmenting urban space with literary connections during the Tove Jansson walk in Helsinki

Abstract

The article employs the theme of a literary walk (Watson 2009), a practice of encountering places with literary associations on foot. Urban areas present especially suitable settings for such themed walks, as cities can have multiple literary connections, and literary places are located within a short distance from one another. In this paper, I focus on the sites associated with Tove Jansson (1914– 2001), a Finnish-Swedish artist and writer, internationally known for her books about the Moomins. The study utilises an autoethnographic approach and draws on observations at the sites with connections to Jansson in Helsinki, organised spatially into a walk around the city. I analyse how urban space can be augmented (Sandvik and Waade 2008) by literary associations through narrativization of the author’s biography and a visitor’s own knowledge and imagination.