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The aim for this thesis was to investigate how boys and men are portrayed in contemporary

Swedish literature that have been acknowledged for depicting male violence. This is done

through a comparative analysis of Björnstad (2016) by Fredrik Backman and Jävla karlar

(2023) by Andrev Walden. The study is motivated against the notion that boys in children’s

literature, as well as within the field for masculinity theory, historically have been portrayed

as having contrasting characteristics in relation to men. Boys are created as wild whereas

men are portrayed as civilized controlled beings, holding the ideal the boys should aspire to

reach for.

Sara Ahmed’s theoretical concept stickiness is used to explain how the image of the boy

discursively is constructed as subordinate in relation to the man. In addition to this, a

methodological model is developed, consisting of three new chronotopes: the boyroom and

the man-land, connected by the teenage-guy’s vestibule. The teenage-guy’s vestibule is a

development of Michail Bachtin’s threshold-chronotope, and is used as the viewpoint in the

analysis. The boy-room is a development of Magnus Öhrn’s chronotope the boy land

(pojklandet), which have been used to analyze boys in historical children’s literature.

Through the analysis it becomes visible that the ideal for boys as well as men is still

constructed from a patriarchal structure. Boys are raised according to the ideal of the wild

boy, reproducing the idea that male subjects are inherently wild, which is seen as a

discursive construction that allows for male violence to continue. Both novels also work to

contest this notion by addressing that the wild characteristics originate and belong in the

man-land. The comparison shows that more literary representations of boys as well as men

could work to counteract the hierarchy, and thus the idea that masculinity is connected to

control and domination.