The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine how librarians in a Swedish public library view and discuss mediation of fiction. The questions posed in this study are: How do the librarians want to work with mediation of fiction? What type of literature should be provided according to them? How do they express that they relate and should relate to their users? The theoretical starting-points are three categories extracted from Jofrid Karner Smidt?s doctor?s dissertation Mellom elite og publikum: the approach to users, strategies for mediation, and ideals for mediation. The empirical material was gathered through focus group interviews with librarians in a public library.

Within the subject of retouching there is an ongoing debate about whether fashion retailers should retouch their ads or not. There has been a large amount of criticism to the communication of stereotyped beauty ideals that is used by companies in their marketing. The stereotyped ideals also contribute to negative psychological effects among people. As a response to the criticism, or as a way to differentiate one-self from competitors, retailers are starting to use unretouched models in their advertising. How this affects the consumer's perception of CSR along with the attitudes and behaviors is still unknown.

vuxnas läsning av skönlitteratur I became happier and wiser: young adults reading of fiction [123[upps-01.gif This Masters thesis explores young adults 18-26 years old, reading of fiction: their reading preferences, the meaning of reading and their access to literature. A study was made by way of a questionnaire, including 56 young adults, and seven qualitative interviews with two groups: one at a folk highschool and the other at a public library. The theories we have used to analyse the results are: theories of gender and youth, theories of literary genres, reader-response criticism, literature sociology and the theories of cultural sociology by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In the analysis the results are compared to other studies of reading habits. Results from this study show that the young adults read fiction from several genres among popular- and quality literature.

The aim of this study is to study the construction of literary values. I have been looking at how literature awarded with sponsored literary prizes has been reviewed in four major English and American newspapers. I have been studying the reception of literature by Ian McEwan, Hilary Mantel, Colm Tóibín and Zadie Smith between 2000 and 2012. The prizes in focus are the Man Booker Prize, the Orange prize for fiction and the Costa Awards. There seems to be an increasing number of articles related to each author after they have been awarded a prize, however with little change in the content of the reviews.

The aim of this essay is to examine the attitudes towards publication of short stories, carried by the employees of Bokförlaget Forum, a randomly chosen Swedish publishing house. The study seeks to investigate the causes behind and consequences of the attitudes, as well as their generality. Through qualitative interviews, carried out with five of the company?s employees, the short story is defined as a problematic genre, mainly due to its low commercial success. The conclusions drawn from the interviews are put into a historical perspective, where the developments of the short story-genre, as well as that of the modern Swedish book market, are discussed.

rspective [123][pdf.gif] The aim of this thesis is to study the Swedish Public Lending Right PLR from the authors perspective. I investigate what the Swedish authors of today think about the system for distributing the money in the Authors trust Författarfonden, and in what ways they want to change it. I also try to distinguish the authors thoughts about how the scolarships from the Authors trust are distributed. What kind of authors do they think are favoured when the money is distributed and what kind of authors are treated unfairly. Finally I investigate how the money is shared out in reality by using some of the literature sociologist Johan Svedjedals theories of the distribution, and compare these facts with the authors thoughts about how the money is distributed.

The natural sciences and the humanities are associated with differentpublishing patterns. Open Access publishing are mainly associated withthe publishing patterns of the natural sciences. Many Swedishuniversities and research funders are proponents of Open Accesspublishing, what will that trend mean to the scholars with a publishingpattern not corresponding to Open Access? In this paper literary scholarsare interviewed for the purpose of learning the motives and strategieswhich form their publishing pattern, and how they relate to Open Accesspublishing. The results show that literary scholars are less competitiveand hold a more gentle knowledge-sharing ideal, than natural scientists.The drive to gain acknowledgment and the recognition of colleagues inorder to collect academic capital as Bourdieu describes the academicfield is still present though.

In the Philosophy of Right Hegel develops the concept Sittlichkeit (Ethical life) that represents Hegel´s view of how the State should be constituted. In Critique of Hegel?s ´Philosophy of Right` Marx provides a critical so called ?Prussian? reading of Hegel as ultimately a defense for the Prussian empire of that time. The study focuses on a close reading of the chapter on the state, which includes the paragraphs 257-313 in the Philosophy of Right. It examines how Marx?s philosophy developed from this Criticism including some of his basic concepts, notably Gemeinwesen and Gattungswesen, that he takes over from Hegel and includes in his own theories of human alienation.

This essay will discuss the Roman God Janus, as a figure of speech, in four different texts written by Publius Ovidius Naso, Michel de Montaigne, Francis Bacon and Elijah Fenton. The Janus figure could also illustrate the relationship between the past, the present and the future, because of the attributes of looking back and forward, in both space and time, that Janus was said to possess. Reinhard Koselleck's ideas of space of experience and horizon of expectation will be used as an analytical approach, thus creating a dual purpose for this essay. On one hand to understand texts about Janus, which implies an understanding of the changes over time associated with the history of ideas of Janus, and on the other the past's importance in relation to the future, which includes an understanding of Janus via Koselleck's thesis about the change in relationship between experience and expectation.The question formulations are as follows: How has the Janus motive changed over time in the researched texts? How can the literary use of Janus show the changed relationship between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation, and in a wider context between the past and the future? Janus has gone from being a physical presence, as the arcs of the Forum Romanum in ancient Rome, to becoming a tool for authors, one that spans many literary rooms.

The main purpose of this Master?s thesis is to analyse the portrayals of working-class life in a selection of works by the Swedish authors Ragnar Järhult and Per Gunnar Evander. The research questions are: * How is the working conditions described?* What political messages can be found in the works?* What image of the class society is shown?The second aim of this Master?s thesis is to analyse the concept of working-class literature and to investigate if the works of Per Gunnar Evander could be seen as working-class literature. Methodologically, the study draws on established theories, concepts and methods from the sociology of literature and the history of ideas.

Literary debates about canon occur regularly. In the summer of 2006 such a debate took place in Sweden. The aim of this Master thesis is to examine the debate to identify the different discourses and what they reveal about ideas concerning the role of literature in society. The empirical material used for the analysis consists of 46 debate articles from three important newspapers. The combined theory and method applied is the discourse analysis described in Ernesto Laclau?s & Chantal Mouffe?s discourse theory.

This thesis presents a qualitative, comparative study of the violence in the adaptations of Hunger Games (Tony Ross, 2012) and Battle Royale (Kinji Fukusaku, 2000). By analyzing the function of violence in a single scene in each of the movies, and comparing it to the literary original, the study aims to explore if there are any differences in the representation of the violence in the two media. The study also briefly discusses whether the violence has any function in bringing the story forward in both the literary sources and in the films and what the motivation for the violence is. "The study also includes a brief analysis of the narratives in relation to the monomyth established by Jospeh Campbell. Specifically, I discuss the similarities between Hunger Games and Battle Royale, which are two stories that have been created in two different cultural traditions, and whether or not we can say that the stories derive from this monomyth." The result concludes that the monomyth can be found in both stories, but that the scenes which is analyzed has to be put into the context and furhter story of the film to be of any relvance to the theory.

The essay is a text centred study of ten Young Adult Novels, in which Internet plays an essential part. The structure is put into light out of used narrative techniques of how to create stories and its construction elements. I compare the ten Young Adult novels to each other. My aim is to analyze the functions of the Internet motive in the chosen novels, using different approaches, and enlighten it with concerns to the new phenomenon that Internet is in society. Consequently the essay will also have a mimetic touch to it.The ten novels that I base the analysis on are written of both med and women and have both male and female as main fictive persons, and are from different parts of the world.

This thesis explores how verbal and nonverbal signs communicate attitudes and the rhetorical functions of such attitudinal signs. Attitudes are regarded as rationalized evaluations of attitudinal objects, and through their manifestation in signs an attitudinal gestalt is communicated. This gestalt is regarded as the audiences perception of the rhetors attitude. It is shown that the attitudinal signs function as ethical, logical and pathetic proofs and that they can create identification between the audience and the rhetor. The signs can have effects on the audiences perception of the attitudinal objects, their perception of the rhetor and influence the social dynamic of the discourse.

The aim of this thesis is to examine how five works of fiction about anorexia and bulimia have been received in Swedish daily press reviews. The investigation is based on 60 reviews, which are analysed with a qualitative method consisting of close-reading and where a feministic perspective is used. The main question concerns how and to which extent the basis of valuation in the reviews is effected by the fact that the books describe a primary female world of experiences. The investigation shows, among other things, that many reviewers consider the books about eating disorders to be too many. They categorize the books about anorexia and bulimia as a genre of its own and place the books into the literary system principally by referring to other books about anorexia and bulimia.