Nobel Prize Laureate Joseph Brodsky is a key figure in Soviet Russian literature. Expelled from the USSR in 1972, he became a US citizen in 1977 and Poet Laureate of the United States in 1991. In this essay, I have sought to examine the state of exile perceived in Brodsky?s poems. Using Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky?s concept of defamiliarization, I have strived to illuminate the formal composition of this state ? its technique.

How do we perceive literature? In our times computer games and Internet have made us grow more comfortable to the usage of non linear storylines. But how does this apply to printed literature?In this essay, called ?From a to b through d h and o. Non linear storytelling in our time? I have focused on nonlinear literature from different time periods and I have studied novels such as James Joyce?s Ulysses as well as works by William S.

With the increasing number of adoptees in Sweden, so has the amount of literature regarding different aspects of adoption. The aim of this study is to explore the construction of adoptees in children's literature. It takes on a social constructionism view, by regarding language as a narrative tool in which human beings construct versions of different phenomenon. By exploring the different discourses in the data within the context adoption, we can identify different versions of "the adopted child" and their needs as it is constructed in the literature. Also, by putting them in a bigger context, we are allowed to see the social structures and the discursive conditions that allow a certain child perspective of "the adopted child" to take place.

The award-winning Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgård achieved great success with his latest book, Min kamp. Both commercially and critically, the novel was praised for its seemingly successful attempt to transcend the boundary between fiction and real life. Focusing on the auto-fictional narrator?s struggle to balance his daily life with his ever so demanding aesthetic ambitions, the novel gives high-detail descriptions of the most basic day-to-day chores, intimately mixed with philosophical reflections on topics such as painting, literature and postmodern civilisation.This essay proposes an alternative perspective on the realism of the novel. Instead of relying on a correspondence theoretical view, which highlights the level of correspondence of a particular representation with reality, I seek, inspired by Martin Heidegger?s thoughts on works of art, to trace a poetics which sees the verity in a work of art as the ?unconcealment? of the world, or the coming-to-being of objects.

The aim with this essay is to look into what literature has been published in 2006 and 2007 for boys between the ages of twelve and sixteen in order to analyse six of the titles. Our two main questions are as follows:?How is the teenage boy depicted in six of these books? - To what extent is the teenage boy depicted in a gender stereotypical way?.We chose the titles for analysis based on our mapping of the published literature and took into account the authors? gender and age as well as the main themes of the books. As theoretical base for our analysis we used Marias Nikolajeva?s table of gender stereotypes in literature.

The aim with this essay is to compare strong girls in classic and modern literature and see how the differences in expectations on these girls are reflected in literature. This study is done with the aid of historical, feminist and new criticism..

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to investigate issues concerning librarians? view on three genres, (a) popular literature for women, (b) popular literature for men and (c) erotic literature, when choosing what to buy for their libraries. A qualitative method has been used and the empery consists of seven qualitative interviews with altogether eight librarians involved in choosing and buying literature. The theoretical framework is built on theories regarding concepts of hegemony and cultural hegemony; the male sex as norm; taste culture and quality. The results show that three of the libraries in the study have a written purchase policy and that the policies that exist are very general.

Although Dan Andersson (1888-1920) is considered perhaps the most important of the early Swedish workingclassauthors, there has not been much research on his work. Through a perspective based on critical whitenessstudies, intersectionality and existential phenomenology, this thesis performs a close reading of Andersson?sKolarhistorier (1914) and Chi-mo-ka-ma (1920) in order to map the discursive formations of whiteness andblackness in the texts, as well as to expose how these formations interrelate with that of humanhood.Since an underprivileged situation of oppression and poverty is the point from which the fictional worldunfolds in both Kolarhistorier and Chi-mo-ka-ma, whiteness is not an existential style within close reach for thecharacters. In Kolarhistorier the charcoal-burners claim themselves as ?weary of whiteness? and accordingly thetext establishes what the thesis reads as a realm of blackness where the black, male body becomes a locus ofpleasure instead of despair.

AbstractThis study is based on my work as a secondary school teacher of literature and the Swedish language and rooted in my interest in developing knowledge about the importance of teaching literature in order to both cultivate young people?s reading habits and their view of themselves as readers. The more concrete purpose of this study is to examine a reading project that focuses on theories of literary perception and teaching literature.I examine four pupils who, in 2003, participated in the reading project as readers and compare this description with their view of themselves as readers seven years later. I complete the study by examining how they discuss reading and the teaching of literature. The method is qualitative and the empirics include materiel collected in two different time periods: first in 2003, in a class I taught in a secondary school; and second in 2010, when I examined four of the former pupils who participated in the project from 2003.

This essay studied how six girls experienced their reading development during their college education in male-dominated profession programs. The issues assumed were how they experience their literature reading and literature education and what happened with their interest in reading. The theoretical frame included researchers Säljö, Rosenblatt, Gun Malmgren, Olin-Scheller, Ulfgaard and Molloy.The study showed that most of the girls felt their reading had worsened but not because of their male classmates but because of school. They had a lot of homework and participated in so many different school projects which would be completed that there was no time to reading for pleasure. The girls did not like the teachers? literate sample and did not like the methods used in learning literature.

This thesis investigates the reception of middle literature novels among critics in Swedish newspapers and at Swedish libraries. Works by three authors were chosen as representatives for middle literature: Helen Fielding, Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons. The investigation is based on interviews with librarians at the Gothenburg City Library, the total purchased number of books at public libraries in Sweden and analysis of Swedish newspaper reviews. The result is compared with theories by literary sociologists as Jofrid Karner Smidt, Janice Radway, Erland Munch-Petersen and Staffan Bergsten among others. It was found out that literary scientists and critics had a different way of looking at middle literature.

Movie and literary tourism is a genre that has been recognized around the world for a long time but that has only recently got a grip on Sweden. More and more famous books are being cinematized and because of the success of these movies we can now walk in the traces of Wallander as well as the Millenniummovies.The focus of this study is mainly about the tourists? motivation when it comes to this form of tourism and the purpose is to try understand what needs come in to play when a movie and literary tourism attraction is chosen. The study objects are two movie and literary walks which are based on books and movies with a fictitious storyline.The performed research was based on a multiple strategy with the qualitative method - consisting of respondent and informant interviews - in focus and the quantitative investigation - in the form of an one-page questionnaire - more as a complement.On the basis of the most fundamental theory of motivation in general (Maslow, 1970) and the tourism research?s more specific travel motivation theory (Pearce, 2005), the conditions for movie and literature as sorts of tourism have been made clear.

The aim with this essay is to look into what literature has been published in 2006 and 2007 for boys between the ages of twelve and sixteen in order to analyse six of the titles. Our two main questions are as follows:?How is the teenage boy depicted in six of these books? - To what extent is the teenage boy depicted in a gender stereotypical way?.We chose the titles for analysis based on our mapping of the published literature and took into account the authors? gender and age as well as the main themes of the books. As theoretical base for our analysis we used Marias Nikolajeva?s table of gender stereotypes in literature.

The purpose of this study is to examine what readers of fiction literature are influenced by when they choose books. What libraries and bookstores do to influence readers in their choice of literature and how readers perceive the librarys and the bookstores influence on them in their choice of fiction literature. We have also studied which factors outside the library and the bookstore that readers are influenced by when borrowing or buying a certain book and to what extent readers are influenced by the books appearance. To answer our questions we chose a public library and a bookstore, where we interviewed six persons in each place. We have interviewed a librarian and a bookstore manager for information about how these two cultural institutions work with marketing of their fiction literature.

This study is based on my work as a teacher of Swedish language and literature to upper secondary school students, and my interest in developing the teaching of literature by using both new criticism theories and theories of literary perception focusing on reader response. The purpose of the study is to examine the learning process in trying to develop literary competence and to find out how to describe the competence shown by the students. My starting-point is a discussion about literary competence and the theory and model of literary competence by Örjan Torell. In examining literary competence, by how students use their constitutional competence as well as performance and literary transfer competences, Torell´s model shows the possibility and the need for both knowledge of literature and personal reception by focusing on the dialogue between author and reader.The method is qualitative and the empirics are material collected in one senior high school class in the Social Science programme during their second and third year. The material contains written reading logs, written answers to tasks and transcribed recordings of discussions of literature.The analysis shows a variety among the literary competence shown and developed by the students and points to the complexity of understanding the concept of literary competence.