This study is based on 26 essays about A Good Book, written by as many participants inSwedish classes in secondary education for adults. The object is to analyse the students'views on fiction and reading: What books they prefer, but also why and how they read.Objectivity and subjectivity in Literary criticism is also discussed.Most favoured author both among men and women is Stephen King. The majority of thebooks mentioned are translated from English. The women also read historical and psychological novels while the men prefer fantasy. The question whether a book is goodor not is in the students' opinion only a matter of taste.

At the centre of this study lies the question if normative gender thinking affects the way poetry gets reviewed and how the reviews are written, this in relation to both the gender of the reviewer and the poet. The study crosses three academic fields; gender studies, poetry and journalism, and is based on the cultural studies theory of media affecting and even creating the world around it.The study is based on two types of analysis. One quantitative analysis based on the thematic criticism theory about detail studies that shows bigger patterns, this analysis focuses on how the poet and his/hers work are being treated in the reviews in areas such as how much space they´re given in the newspapers, how they are named by the reviewer and the tendency to quote the reviewed work.  And one qualitative analysis based on the new criticism method of close reading, that focuses on the reviewers way of writing and how that may be connected with theories of gender differences, this both connected to the gender of the reviewers and the poets.The material chosen for this study are all the reviews that were published in the same newspapers and that reviewed two specific poetry works by two specific poets chosen with great sensibility to age and career so that their difference in gender would be the most significant difference between them. The works were chosen based on year of publishing, they were supposed to be published as newly as possible and as close to each other in time as possible.

This Master?s thesis explores three contemporary Swedish poets? ? Lars Mikael Raattamaa, Anna Hallberg and Johan Jönson ? understanding of their work as a political activity. By using Jonathan Culler?s theory on literary competence and literary conventions as a theoretical tool for an idea analysis, the three poets' arguments for or against certain literary techniques, and their ideas about readers and reading, are explored and discussed. In what ways are established literary methods questioned by the three poets? In what ways are established theories on readers and reading questioned? In what way can their poetic work be regarded as political? As a background, the debate about poetry in Swedish newspapers and literary magazines is presented, as well as the common focus on readers and reading in social sciences and in humanities and arts.

Feberboken, written by Stina Aronson and published in 1931, is a fragmentary meta literary autobiographical work told and written by the pseudonymous female author Mimmi Palm. The novel tells about a literary-erotic passion causing female subordination, fever and sick-ness. It balances between biography and fiction and consistently decontructs itself through its meta literary prespective. This essay finds that the structure of the novel and its thematical confusion of literature and erotique, fiction and reality, woman and man, derives from a struggle for definitions. Thus, the essay attempts to a close reading focusing on ambivalence and resistance and in order to determine the nature of the fever, it tries to analyze Feberboken in the light of early Swedish literary modernism.

Adam Smith?s economic theory is often subject to criticism, in which it is claimed to be inherently inconsistent. Recently, criticism from well-known scholars has arisen claiming Smith should be characterized a labor value theorist anticipating Karl Marx. This study seeks to analyze whether such criticism is legitimate. Firstly, the economic theory of Smith is discussed in terms of consistency, and secondly, a number of typical and main points of the critique, from the most influential of his contemporary critics, are lifted up and analyzed.

The objective for this Master?s thesis is to study literary programs for infants at six Swedish public libraries, their relevance and importance for infants and how the infant?s perspective in the program design and implementation is taken into consideration. The questions I pose are: In which way do the programs take the infants need for development and their literary prerequisites into consideration? Which functions can the programs have for infants? I have used a qualitative method, based on deep interviews with six library staff, working with literary programs. A model was developed based upon Daniel Stern?s theories of the interpersonal world of the infant together with Joseph Appleyard?s reading development theory.

The aim of this study is to explore the fundaments of all psychoanalytic interpretative models, and especially the psychoanalytic Literary criticism. Drawing from different fields as affect theory, neuropsychology and Lacan's structural psychoanalysis, strong evidence is found that language in itself contains and transmits affects.The empiric study indicates that different readers of a text, regardless of their interpretation of the text, show similar changes in mood as a function of the text. This seems to be possible as an effect of the separation of the sign between the signifier and the signification. And this supports that the signifier has some kind of direct access to the affects. This is due to the fact that the signifier belongs to the imaginary protolinguistic level while the signification belongs to the symbolic and linguistic level of a higher order.

The purpose with this thesis is to examine how four novels with a trait of confession written between 1996 and 2001 have been received in the Swedish daily press. This is done from a feministic perspective. The study is based on 36 reviews and the method which is used consists of a close-reading of the reviews, where the following questions are asked to the texts: Are there examples of reception in sexual analogies?; Are the novels ascribed a status of universality or are they considered to be something private?; How does the reviewers comment the exposure of the authors themselves and persons close to them?; What does the positive versus negative criticism concentrate on?; How does the reviewers comment the sexual element in the novels? The theoretical framework focuses on how womens literature has been treated in Literary criticism and the treatment of the confession novels in the 1970s. The analysis of the reviews has, among many other things, showed that the novels mostly are regarded as something private; that the reviewers for different reasons question the publishing of the novels and that there are things concerning women and sexuality that is not accepted to write about.

In this essay I evaluate the legality of Karl Popper?s criticism against psychoanalysis, regarding this theory of Freud?s being pseudoscientific. Popper?s criticism is based on his theory of demarcation in which he states that an empirical theory must be possible to test by observations in order to be, as most important is, hypothetically possible to falsify based on other empirical statements ? often in the form of new found facts that contradict the original statement/theory. In purpose of assessing Popper?s criticism I perform a modified idea analysis, based on a book by Evert Vedung (1977).

The paper discusses the problems contemporary Swedish art criticism faces when judging performance art and interactive art. Problems include among others that performance art is collectively ignored in Swedish newspaper art criticism. This prevents art critics from fair contextualising of contemporary performance art. Down in the rabbit hole, performance by Tris Vonna-Michell and its reception exemplifies these problems. Performance and interactive art seems to be disturbing art critics.

This Masters thesis concerns a series of ten police procedural novels, Roman om ett brott, Novel of a crime, by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. These books are among the most translated Swedish novels and have been popular among audiences and critics all over the world. The books were produced 1965 1975, a period during which a left wing movement swept over the Western world. Besides from being detective stories Novel of a crime is an analysis of contemporary society, and this thesis will focus on the social and political ideas and the criticism expressed in the books. Theories used in this study are the Sociology of Literature and the Analysis of Ideas.

The purpose of this masters thesis is to examine outlines of literary history for students at upper secondary school from a gender studies perspective. Earlier theoretical work concerning outlines of literary history is sparse. There are three dissertations, but none with an explicit gender perspective. The theoretical approach comes mainly from theories in literary historiography and gender research. Also discussed are the following concepts: canon, literary field and literary valuation.

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.

This essay examines teaching in source criticism in upper secondary school history education. Two questions are to be answered: 1. What are the conditions like for teaching source criticism? 2. What opportunities for further development in teaching source criticism are there? In order to set a standard for what knowledge and skills in source criticism the students need, I design a four step model for good source criticism based on the historical science.

This essay discusses the problem of literary history in the Swedish school system. The aim of the essay is to discuss whether the textbook, Den Levande litteraturen, in literary history for Swedish high school students measures up to the demands of the curriculum in terms of obtaining knowledge about international literature and the historical and cultural framework that surrounds it. The essay establishes a theoretical framework that is used to distinguish the discourse that permeates the textbook and how it affects the means of sustaining the curriculum and the problems it may create.The textbook is broken down chronologically and analyzed showing quotes that points towards national and orientalistic discourses which in turn are discussed put in relation to the curriculum and the effects that these discourses might have on education in Swedish and literary history.This is in turn problematized with the current theories regarding comparative literary history..