identity and worldview – “hard-boiled” writing in Thorsten Jonsson’s short stories
This article deals with the Swedish author Thorsten Jonsson (1910–50) and his first short story collection Som det brukar vara (1939) [‘As it usually is’]. The nar- rative represents a new modernistic literary trend in Swedish prose in the 1930s. i take my starting point in Burgess & ivanič’s (2010) theories of the act of writing involving many different identities, and particularly what Burgess & ivanič iden- tify as the discursive self. By contemporary readers and critics the discursive self in the short story collection was often connected with an American hard-boiled literary ideal, often linked to ernest Hemingway’s writings. in this article i dis- cuss the common textual features of the two authors’ first collections, but also the differences that emerge when looking through the linguistic surface. The analysis shows that Thorsten Jonsson’s discursive self is based upon a northern Swedish culture, Hemingway’s on an urban American one.