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Boström, T. 1979. Den objudne gästen. HurMaeterlinckintroducerades och mottogs i Sverige intill 1903. The Intruder. How Maeter1 inck1 s work became known and was received in Sweden up to I9O3. With a Summary in French. ISBN 91-7174-038-4. 230 pp.The aim of the thesis is to show how Maurice Maeter1 i nek 1 s work became known i n Sweden and how it was received up to 1903. This examination is placed in relation to important facts concerning the man himself, his aesthetic theory, his literary production in general and the background of Belgium and France. From these countries his literary path is traced to Sweden through Denmark, Norway and Finland. Attention is concentrated on Maeterlinck's reception by the Scandi nav.i an pub 1 i c and on which of his works were translated and published or introduced by means of the stage. In this connection the motives and principles for staging The Intruder and Pelléas and Mé1 isande are studied. Up to 1892 Scandinavian critics regarded Maeterlinck's works as being essentially realistic. Later there was a change and the critics then began to regard and interpret him as a symbolist. On the whole it cannot be said that Maeter1 i nek was justly performed or understood, which probably helped to delay interest in him and in symbolism in general. Opponents of conventional Swedish stage procedure sometimes used Maeterlinck as a positive argument for change,but on the whole the spiritual climate remained unfavourable for the author. Not until 1902 did Maeterlinck become a recognised master owing to two Swedish translations of the internationally successful Life of the Bees, which received cri t i cal acci aim and was the start of his breakthrough in Sweden. The following year Monna Vanna was a similar success on the Swedi s h s tage. The traditions in Swedish cultural life which had meant that Maeterlinck's symbolist works were not accepted instead ensured his success now that he had abandoned symbolism.

The aim of this dissertation is to describe Karin Boye as a critic and a modernist novel writer. The material consists of Karin Boye's works, articles from newspapers and periodicals and secondary sources. The method applied is a critical investigation of basic hermeneutic principles with special reference to sexual/textual politics.

The introductory survey of the development of critical methods in the Swedish literary institution from 1925 to 1935 shows the total domination of traditional hermeneutic methods based on an idealistic conception of man and on aesthetic norms and ideological presumptions inherited from the 19th century novel. The reception of Karin Boyes novels 1931—1934 shows to what extent patriarchal ideology also informed the critical terms. In later research on Karin Boye the interpretation of her early novels has never been questioned. Nor has her position as an introducer of the new modernist aesthetics as an editor of the avantgarde journal Spektrum or as a critic in the left wing press been regarded as a factor to take into account.

In Spektrum Karin Boye formulates a radical program which combines the new aesthetics with the social situation of the time as well as with psychoanalytic theory. Karin Boye's awareness that the medium — language — was part of the modern writer's dilemma led her to explore new methods of representation. Like other modernists Karin Boye shows a desire for inclusive - ness. She looks for literary forms that can bring together the full complexity of modern experience in a meaningful way. Karin Boye stresses that the shift from traditional literary conventions to a new way of representation demands of the reader a far more active participation in understanding the work of art.

In her novels Astarte, Merit vaknar and Kris Karin Boye develops her ideas of poetic language, which could have an emancipatory function in the life of modern man. She uses an experimental method to criticize the rationalism of the Platonic tradition. Karin Boyes way of organizing the text involves irony, the use of analogy and the mythical method. She also lets the novels draw attention to themselves as works of art, emphasizing that they are subject to the techniques of presentation the novelist adopts. A matter of special inquiry is the connection between women's liberation and the female writer's use of images, symbols and myths. The works of Karin Boye show an interesting relationship between feminism and modernism.

Transitional Sisters traces how the ideology of hegemonic masculinity operates, how it is safeguarded, and how it remains unquestioned within theatre as an institution.

This thesis deals with the problems of genre and narrative techniques in two novels by the Swedish author Hjalmar Bergman, 1883-1931. Although regarded as one of the foremost novelists in Swedish literature, with novels such as Markurells i Wadköping, 1919, and Farmor och vår Herre, 1921, Bergman's narrative techniques have not previously been systematically analyzed. Instead critics have focussed either on the biographical and philosophical aspects of his work, or on the meaning of his specific use of symbols and metaphorical language.

Hjalmar Bergman wrote more than twenty novels, a large number of plays, short stories, fairy tales and screenplays. His most innovative period was in the 1910s, which is also the period focussed on here. The study begins with the reception of the seven novels written from 1912 to 1918. These novels were considerably different from what the critics at the time were wont to expect. Consequently they had trouble understanding not only the purpose of the narrative techniques in the novels, but also in determining their specific genre and subject matter.

The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that by analyzing Hjalmar Bergman's narrative techniques, we can learn more about the genre of the novel, about its status in the Swedish literary institution of the 1910s, and about Hjalmar Bergman's contribution to its development in Sweden. For this purpose the methods of the Russian theorist of the novel, Mikhail Bakhtin, have proved to be useful.

In the succeeding chapters two novels, Loewenhistorier, 1913 (Loewen Stories) and En döds memoarer, 1918 (The Memoirs of a Dead Man), are analyzed for a deeper understanding of Hjalmar Bergman's specific use of novelistic subgenres such as the adventure story, the picaresque, the Bildungsroman, the confession, the memoir etc. Hjalmar Bergmanhas been considered a 'pre-modernist' in Swedish prose fiction. If this is the case, it is not primarily because hetried to invent new ways of writing novels, but rather that he made use of seemingly well-defined genres, combining them in new and often surprising ways. He thereby investigates not only a subject matter or a protagonist, but also the relevance, with regard to the stories hesets out to tell, of the genre-bound plots and perspectives. The result is novels that are simultaneously highly structured and 'law-abiding', in accordance with their genre patterns, and characterized by a certain open-ended 'brokenness'. Nothing ever turns out as the reader might expect, judging from the genres used in the novels.

This dissertation consists of three parts: the fourth chapter in my book Fotboll och frihet«. Studier i Max Lundgrens författarskap (Football and Freedom. Studies in Max Lundgren's Authorship), 1987, and the two studies that this volume contains: En undersökning av tillvaron. Gunnel Beckman's ungdomsroman Tillträde till festen (An analysis of existence. Gunnel Beckmans novel for young people, Tillträde till festen /Admission to the Feast/) and Barnbokskritik i förvandling. Debatt om litteratur och ungdomsläsning 1966-1970 (The transformation of children's literature reviews. The debate concerning literature and young people's reading 1966-1970). The time of the youth revolt, the late 1960s, with the year 1968 as an almost mythical period, is portrayed as part of an explanatory model for the three studies.

In 1968, Max Lundgren received the Nils Holgersson Plaque for his books for young people Pojken med guldbyxorna (The Boy With the Golden Trou­sers) and Åshöjdens bollklubb (Åshöjden Football Club). I show through my interpretations of the above mentioned and Max Lundgren's other books of this time, that the texts hold an existential concept of freedom; life is not totally determined, man has a certain amount of choice.

Through my interpretation of Gunnel Beckman's well-known youth novel from 1969, Tillträde till festen (Admission to the Feast) I show how the content of the story changes, in the same way as in the work of Max Lundgren, from that of the fear of death to that of the conditions and possibilities of existence.

The late 1960s can be described as a golden age for Swedish literature aimed at young people thanks to Max Lundgren, Gunnel Beckman, and other authors like Hans Eric Hellberg and Sven Wernström. The debate centered a- round children's literature was at this time affected by the ideologies that were prevalent, but the critics of children's literature also showed a con­tinuous interest in aesthetic and educational aspects.

The study aims to describe and to explain some temporal aspects of the rhythmic structure of Swedish, and to compare Swedish, Spanish, and Finnish, characterized as rhythmically different languages.

The temporal effects of some manipulations believed to have consequences for rhythm were studied in a series of experiments based on sets of Swedish sentences. These manipulations included the length of stress groups - the number of unstressed syllables between stressed ones - and their structural properties. Also the length of the surrounding stress group was varied, as well as speech rate.

The results indicated the presence of several interacting factors. First, there was an inverse relation between the length of the phrase and the duration of the stress group: phrase-lenqth adjustments. Ihe

effects were similar to those obtained when speech rate was independently varied. Secondly, adjacent stress groups were adjusted so that differences of duration were counteracted: stress-qroup adjustments.

In addition, in longer stress groups rhythmic alternation between unstressed syllables occurred. Finally, there was an interplay between rhythm and language structure. This was evident from the stability of the temporal manifestations of the quantity distinction and the distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables irrespective of the experimental manipulations.

The results were interpreted in terms of a process model of speech rhythm, the generality of which was considered in the cross-language comparisons. The presence of similar temporal effects in all three languages was taken to support assumptions of language-independent processing constraints. Deviations from the general pattern were explainable in terms of differences of language structure and adjustments to preserve important structural properties, especially quantity relations.

The dissertation deals with the Municipal Theatre of Göteborg with special reference to the period between 1967 and 1971, during which the group theatre developed and paved the way for a repertoire of social criticism.

The theatre debate is viewed against the background of the socio-economic, ideo­logical, and cultural development of the 1960^,s. After describing conditions at the Municipal Theatre of Göteborg under Mats Johansson's management from 1962 onwards, the study concentrates on analysing three group theatre plays produced by Lennart Hjulström: Flotten (spring 1967) by Kent Andersson, Hemmet (autumn 1967) by Kent Andersson and Bengt Bratt, and Sandlådan (autumn 1968) by Kent Andersson.

The first play thematizes the ideological confusion of the middle-aged generation, the second the disappointment of the aged at the betrayal of socialist ideals, and the third the manipulative repression of children's education.

A series of stagings with strong elements of social criticism caused a long and intense debate in the summer of 1969 about both the repertoire and the internal conditions of the Municipal Theatre.

In spring, 1971, Kent Andersson and Bengt Bratt wrote Tillståndet (an ambiguous title meaning both 'condition' and 'permission'), by which the authors intended to ex­pose the repressive tolerance of bourgeois society. This play functions as an evaluation of both the group theatre period and the situation of the theatre as a whole, and it is therefore analysed in a metaperspective. It also functions as a summary of the criticism of the Swedish welfare state.