Ian T. Gwin

Ian T. Gwin translates modernist and contemporary literature from Estonian, Finnish and the Baltic languages. The Estonian decadent Jaan Oks inspired his 2022 Masters Thesis: Jaan Oks and the Fall of Humankind, which includes three works of prose, translated with historical and critical commentary. His research touches broadly on early modernism, decadence and draws from a variety of comparative and theoretical approaches, such as deconstruction and queer theory.

His Ph.D. dissertation describes decadence, nationalism, and the fairy tale in literature around the Baltic Sea. His approach combines various critical methods from the study of the literary fairy tale (psychoanalytic, formalist) with folklore studies and the oral tale. Reading the history of the genre in the region implicated in its hybrid form, he traces the reception of H. C. Andersen and the Brothers Grimm in the development of national identity and literature into a “late” modernity and decadence. He covers Estonian (Kreutzwald, Friedebert Tuglas), Finnish (Anni Swann, Joel Lehtonen), Latvian (Rainis, Karlīs Skalbe), Lithuanian (Oscar Milosz, Julius Kaupas) and other authorships.