Along with literature written in Finnish, that written in Swedish has always played a major role in the literature of the country; indeed, down till the 1880s the greater part of belles lettres writing was published in Swedish. In the self-perception of literature written in Swedish in Finland, an important shift has taken place: from its initial status as a literature belonging to Sweden, and its nineteenth-century position at the very heart of the Finnish national movement, at the beginning of the twentieth century it assumed the self-identity of a minority literature.