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Kampen om definitioner i Stina Aronsons Feberboken
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. With Foucault?s definitions of the discour-sive relation of power and its regementarity, it reads the novel as an allegory of the female authorship in a masculine modernistic literary discourse, as well as an allegory of the female author?s practise of technologies of the self within this discourse. It finds that the novel is both influenced by and critical of the order of the modernistic literary discourse and that Aronson through pseudonymity and metaperspectivity is reaching for a gender neutral literary voice.