Mental and material reconstruction was - and is - an ongoing process after World War II. This volume combines a detailed treatment of post-war cultural reconstruction in Finnish Lapland with comparative case studies. The contributors shed light on key aspects of cultural reconstruction generally.

Introduction Part 1: Reconstructing Hopes, Memories and Narratives 1. Post-War Cultural Reconstruction and the Nation: Some Comparative Considerations 2. Reconstructing Saami Culture in Post-War Finland 3. The Politics of Silences: Women's War Experiences and the Discourses of Reconstruction in Poland (1945-1948) 4. "This Is My Past": War, Memory, and Forgiveness in Rosa Liksom's Novel The Colonel's Wife 5. Petsamo: A Region Lost, a People Ignored 6. Less Holy?: Reconstructing Eastern Orthodoxy in Post-War Finnish Lapland 7. Reconstructed Landscapes of Northern Youth: Reading the Autobiographies of Finnish Youth, 1945-1960 8. Reconstructing Haunted Places: Postmemory and Ancestral Homelands Part II: Reconstructing Landscapes and Mindscapes 9. Prison Island: Place of Remembrance or Place of Parley? 10. The Artist's Gaze Turns to the Landscape and Wilderness 11. "On the Border Between Past and Future": Two Male Artists of Lapland and Their Relationship to Nature 12. Reviving the Legacy of Reconstruction-Period Type-Planned Houses