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This dissertation examines the presence of images from media and popular culture in Swedish poetry from the latter half of the twentieth century. It investigates how the increasingly image- and affect-saturated culture of the 1960s through the 2000s reshaped poetic imagination and form, and how Swedish poets responded to these transformations in their work. This examination proceeds through analyses and interpretations of canonical Swedish poets from the period: Tomas Tranströmer, Göran Sonnevi, Kristina Lugn, Ann Jäderlund, and Åsa Maria Kraft. 

Central to the dissertation is the concept of alien fantasies. This concept is used to designate a category of widely circulating, standardized media images that became commonplace in the collective imagination and a defining feature of the lifeworld of late twentieth-century Sweden, as the population grew increasingly connected through a shared media infrastructure. The study traces how these images introduced new existential tensions into contemporary experience by blurring distinctions between proximity and distance, self and other, individual and collective. It further examines how their circulation and pervasive presence in the media altered the conditions under which language could evoke imagination and affect in others. 

The dissertation argues that alien fantasies, and the existential challenges associated with them, function as a key driving force in Swedish postmodern poetry on both thematic and rhetorical levels. Drawing on a combination of hermeneutic and historical-poetical analysis, the study shows how alien fantasies gave rise to a distinct postmodern experience marked by the intrusion of externally produced images into embodied subjectivity. It further demonstrates how the same fantasies enabled a new evocative mode of writing, traceable in postmodern rhetorical devices such as language magic, pastiche, virtual realism, and postmodern allegory.