Even though the American author H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) has been praised as one of the most influential writers of horror literature in the 20th century, his style of writing has occasionally been criticized. Lovecraft was using a writing style based on strict scientific language, where the human condition and existence are irrelevant in the narrative. This includes less focus on character development and more on the importance of atmosphere and environments. I am presenting narratological analyzes of what is often considered to be three of Lovecraft?s ?greatest works?: ?The Call of Cthulhu?, At the Mountains of Madness, and ?The Shadow over Innsmouth.? These analyzes are used to highlight Lovecraft?s science-oriented language and narratological techniques, with the focus of studying what methods Lovecraft was using to give his works and his readers a sense of dread, hopelessness, and an alien atmosphere.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to examine the representation of student life in Uppsala in the 1860s and 1870s in memoirs. This purpose is achieved by contextualising the memoirs in two different analyses. In the first, the representation of student life in the memoirs is compared to that in another literary genre, the university novel, and it is found that the two representational forms paint completely contradictory pictures, where in the novels the higher education is depicted as rotten and in dire need of reformation, whereas in the memoirs the system, albeit somewhat flawed, works. The memoirs and the novels thus seem to be competing systems of representation, created in different discourses, wherein the purpose and nature of higher education widely differed. In the second analysis, the examination of the memoirs is based on research concerning the nation building process in Sweden during the 19th century.

The purpose of this thesis is to make a comparative literary study of ten laboratory experiments with different kind of sources for query expansion terms. The experiments are grouped according to categories of term sources, which are: search results, collection dependent knowledge structures, collection independent knowledge structures and one that combines the two last mentioned sources into one. To enable a comparison all other variables were held as constant as possible. There is the improvement measured in mean average precision, which is used to measure the various sources potential. The result from the study shows a strong connection between the kind of source for the expansion term and improvement of the result.

The first vampire film I ever saw was Interview with a vampire. ?I haven?t been human for two hundred years?, opened up not only the film, but a whole new world I knew nothing about. The world, as it were, opened its doors to me again after I had seen the film adaption of Stephenie Meyers Twilight. I decided to write down a few thoughts, capture my frame of mind, and these paragraphs then turned into a text: ?I tankarnas skal?.              When I did research for this essay I discovered that my text held certain similarities with the modern vampire novel.

The aim of this master?s thesis is to explore what learning potentials there are in Demoteket. Demoteket is an on-going project that preserves and exhibits young people?s artistic creations. The idea is that public libraries receives and lends out the young people?s artistic creations.

For many individuals gambling gives an opportunity for relaxation and social relations. The positive effects of gambling are for most individual?s considerable more than the negative effects. Even if gambling gives positive effects there is individuals that cannot control there gambling and therefore develop an addiction which disturb there life situation and health. The aim of this study was to describe which personal characteristics distinguish people with a pathological gambling and which psychological, physical and social consequences this pathological gambling causes for the individual.

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.

This study views literary authors as brands and their books as products. The essay examines if different marketing activities will influence attitudes and intentions towards these brands, depending on how famous the author is and how much knowledge the consumer possess about the product category. The theory, which the hypotheses are based upon, mainly consists of research about culture, brands, attitudes and intentions. The study is quantitative and has an experimental design consisting of different written scenarios. These scenarios are based on background information about a fictive fiction author and type of marketing campaign.

Sara Lidman?s second novel Hjortronlandet (1955) unfolds in the north of Sweden in the early 20th century. It describes the progress of modernity and the conflicting interests of an old local culture and a new more ?civilised? one. The two cultures are constituted by different value systems and in the novel they are represented by two neighbour communities.

I have been using qualitative interviews to explore music's influence in school from a learning perspective, community perspective and identity-building perspective. I have visited two classes at two different schools to do these interviews with ten informants, both students and teachers. My interview questions were almost the same for both students and teachers, but differed in wording. My research is based on the informants? answers and relevant sources such as literary books, curricula and the Internet.After fieldwork was completed, I transcribed the interviews to further analyze them according to relevant theories, such as Bergman (2009) and Antal Lundström (1996).

In this essay I point out that the presence of  ?Otherness? plays a key role in the novel The Beach by Alex Garland, and that the text relates to a colonial literary tradition. I?ve mainly used the distinction of Otherness and cultural representation presented by the postcolonial theorist Edward W. Said to guide me.

The aim of this study is to examine how public librarians in small Swedish municipalities experience their professional roles. As part of examining such an abstract subject as experiences we also examine what tasks they perform, which will function as a support of the analysis. The theoretical frame-work is based on librarian identities worked out by Anders Ørom and a model of professional roles worked out by Maj Klasson. The analytical procedure consists of both deductive and inductive viewpoints. The empirical material consists of qualitative semi-structured interviews with five librarians that work in public libraries located in municipalities with less than 12 500 inhabitants.

The construction industries are relatively conservative type of business that takes a longtime to adjust for new methods and embrace new ideas. It dose not matter if the newmethod seems to be an improved method as long as it is new and untried. Constructioncompanies are reluctant to change form a longtime working method to a relativelyunknown method.The purpose with our report is to perform an evaluation of BeWi construction method.Our goal are to present the generally opinion about BeWi from the contractors that hasbeen in contact/worked with the method. We also want to know from the contractor?spoint of view if BeWi and the method measure up to the standards that are presented byBeWi and if they believe that improvements need to be done.Our progress up to the final report has consisted of three parts[1]Field studies[2]Interviews[3]Literary studiesWe started out with field studies where we took notes and observed all the includedworking phases on the construction site when using the BeWi method.

This study was made for the Swedish forest company Sveaskog because the sawmills they delivered timber to had noticed a high frequency of bucking splits in their products. Coworker Jim Edström at Sveaskog also wanted to know if there was a big difference between different felling heads. The purpose with this study has been to find out the amount of bucking splits and if there is any felling head brand that did a bigger damage that the others. The study was made in two steps, where the first part was a literary review to find out results and conclusions in earlier studies. The best measuring method to check bucking splits was the known ?trissmetoden?.

This thesis investigates the situation for comics in Swedish public libraries. The main questions is separated into two groups, the first dealing with the physical situation were we investigate placement, cataloguing and shelf arrangement. The second deals with the librarians attitudes towards comics and how they may affect their work. The base for this thesis is the idea that the comic medium may sometimes be treated different than the rest of the libraries collections. Because of this, a theoretical basis is developed which focus on different views on comics.