Estonian Pragmapoetics, from Poetry and Fiction to Philosophy and Genetics

Arne Merilai, PhD, is Professor and Chair of Estonian Literature at the University of Tartu, Estonia. His primary areas of research comprise national and comparative literature, poetic language and philosophy, and unified literary theory. His first book, on Estonian ballads, was published in 1991, followed by his co-authored volume on Estonian poetry in exile (1994). In 2003, Merilai released a substantial anthology of Estonian ballads, a joint textbook of poetics, and a monograph on pragmapoetics, a theory of two contexts. Besides editing collective research volumes, he has published three books of his own selected articles, essays, and criticism (2011, 2011, and 2022). He has also penned two collections of poetry, a play, a novel, a large-scale outdoor video mapping show script, and a handful of short stories. The author has about 400 publications to his credit.