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.

The purpose of this study is to explore the concept of the immigrant-writer. By studying the literary criticism on four debutants, all of whom have been categorised as immigrant-writers, I have come to the conclusion that the critics tend to focus on the authors' otherness. By using postcolonial theory I've analysed the role as representatives of a supposed other reality that is imposed on these four authors by the literary critics. The theories of Pierre Bourdieu, especially his concepts of symbolic capital, literary field and position, have been used to contextualise these conclusions. Although the otherness that the critics accentuate seems to work as a negative symbolic capital in a bigger societal perspective, in the author's position within the literary field it grows their positive symbolic capital.

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.

Reading and analyzing literature has a long tradition of being an essential part of the teaching of English in Sweden. As the offers of entertainment have increased in popular culture with the introduction of computer games, internet and other media, interest in reading novels has decreased. Literature is still a compulsory part of English teaching and the question is how teachers of today use literature and what kind of literary instruction they use.The aim of this study is to explore and discuss the literary instruction discourse in pedagogical texts, lessons, created by and for English teachers of Swedish Upper Secondary Schools. The lessons have been collected from the site lektion.se, where teachers are able to share knowledge and lessons. The study uses an analytical method based on Norman Fairclough´s Critical Discourse Analysis in order to analyze the lessons.

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 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 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.

In public libraries there seems to be an unspoken consensus on what literary quality is. At the same time librarians are always eager to express the opinion that quality lies in the eye of the beholder. Quality is, it is said, something that you don t have to define. But at the same time it s up to everyone to decide what quality means to them. What I have been missing from the discussion in libraries about literary quality is a theoretical awareness about what it means to divide literature into higher and lower spheres.

This study has examined how teachers in Swedish upper secondary schools work to foster a critical perspective through the education in the subject of Swedish. The study is based on qualitative interviews conducted with three teachers, who have given their views on the role of source criticism and critical analysis of literature in the subject of Swedish. Furthermore, they have described how they incorporate these views into their own teaching.The study has shown that the teachers find that source criticism and literary analysis are interconnected, since both depend on a general critical approach, which they both help foster. The main question the study examined was how Swedish education could help foster a critical perspective. The interviewed teachers' ways of working point out a way: teacher C has integrated source criticism and referencing into most of their education, which makes them central to the education in Swedish.

The purpose of this masters thesis is to examine how librarians work in a literary educational role with literary circles for adults and youth, in public libraries and at school. The study also examines whether participation in book discussion groups has any effect on participants and librarians regarding changes in reading habits and in personal development. Another aspect investigated was how participants experienced the atmosphere in the group. We have conducted qualitative interviews with five librarians who have lead different literary circles and with two participants from each literary circle. In all 13 interviews were conducted.

In this study I compare the use of reporting verbs in direct speech in Swedish and Polish literary prose. The aim is to examine how differences in usage are reflected in translations to and from Swedish and to what extent the translator adapts the text to the target language and its literary conventions.I have compared the material on two levels: source text versus source text in Polish and Swedish respectively, to see what kind of speech verbs are most commonly used, and source text versus target text, to study the strategies the translators have used and to what extent reporting verbs are altered or not.I have also studied quotation verb + adverbial phrase or prepositional phrase, to investigate if they are more frequent in the two target texts or adapted to the literary concentions of the target language. .

This essay is a study of explicit subjectivity and valuation in Swedish literary historiography from a power perspective. The methodology involves qualitative perusal of literary handbooks from 1915 to 1999. The author Fredrika Runeberg is taken as a window, in that I have examined if and how she is described in the selected handbooks. The main purpose has been to see if subjectivity in disparaging terms and condemnation of authorship have become more evident during the years under consideration. I have related the twelve selected handbooks to Hallberg's five methods for literary historiography.

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to examine how The Trilogy of Pippi Longstocking, written by the author Astrid Lindgren, has been received by the critics in the Swedish daily press. A second aim is to examine how the critics could be of importance for the consecration of Pippi as a literary character. The study is mainly based on reviews from the daily press with nationwide coverage. The theoretical framework consists of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu?s theories of the literary field, and the method of the reviews is a qualitative text analysis.

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.

At the dusk of the Second World War, when the Red Army was approaching Tallinn and the second Soviet occupation of Estonia could be foreseen, almost a tenth of the population left the Estonian coasts to seek refuge in the West. About 30 000 of those ended up in Sweden, among which were some of the most prominent Estonian novelists and poets. Sweden would become the literary center for the worldwide exile Estonian diaspora. However, the fact that a few dozens of Estonian authors published some 2 000 titles in Sweden, where most of the authors as well as the main publishing houses resided, was and has remained unknown to most Swedes as it has gone fairly unnoticed to the field of Swedish Literary Studies. From the perspective that the exile Estonian literature written in Sweden is actually part of our history of literature, this thesis aims to find out what factors have had impact, and how, on the authors? opportunities to gain recognition by the Swedish literary establishment and eventually being included in the Swedish literary historical works.